[915] in libertarians
Re: PGP and mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Sun Apr 23 17:21:38 1995
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 17:11:57 EDT
From: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>
|> BTW, I've heard of automated Internet-snooping programs that look for
|> keywords and copy, for later manual reading, all files that meet the
|> heuristic criteria. What would happen if people started lacing all their
|> messages with random keywords that might attract the snooper programs,
|> like "PGP"?
This is already the practice of at least one remailer that I know
of (I can't recall the name of it now). For those who don't know,
remailers are set up as addresses you send mail to and then they
foraward it anonymously to wherever it's supposed to go. Using
PGP, you can encrypt ingoing and outgoing messages (ingoing uses
remailers public key, outgoing uses real adressee's public key)
so you don't have to worry about remailer sniffers (there's
other things to do to, like delay time and message padding so that
traffic analysis won't reveal much). Anyway, one remailer at least,
as part of it's normal header/footer addition adds a line at the
bottom such as "Got the C4 yesterday, AK-47's due friday. The bastards
will never know what hit them." And then goes on to explain that
this was a auto generated line to fool snooper programs, "so there."
You can find out about all this stuff via the WWW. Look in our
Libertarian "good links" page at MIT for "internet tools" and
also under "crypto issues."
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| Vernon Imrich | market failure, n. The inabilty of the |
| MIT, Dept. OE | market to recover from a blow by |
| Cambridge, MA 02139 | intervention. (The Exchange) |
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| MIT LP: http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/libertarians/home.html |
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