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[fanf]

I've been arguing online quite a lot today, perhaps most prominently on Dave Farber's Interesting People list. I think the EFF are overstating the free speech implications of authenticated email, and that their arguments against new technologies are wrong.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200502/msg00247.html

This post happened to coincide with a discussion on the IETF email message format discussion list about syntax changes to support anonymous messages, e.g. by omitting the From: field.

http://www.imc.org/ietf-822/mail-archive/maillist.html

I think this is all pretty worthless. If you are serious about anonymity you should use serious anonymizing technology like mixmaster. The illusory secrecy provided by hiding your email address (but not your IP address) will just get you in trouble.

Comments

[fanf]

I agree.

The mixmaster FAQ says a lot about this issue: they have to be very careful about abuse in order to protect themselves from being shut down for reasons of spam and so forth, so they have to have at least some protection. However they mustn't keep so much trace information that their legitimate users can be caught.

Secure anonymity (secure for the person who wants to act anonymously and secure for the rest of the Net) requires a trustworthy intermediary. The second message from the EFF person is basically bemoaning the lack of such an entity. The technical details of email are irrelevant.