Noise - Anonymous Remailers: The importance of widely-available anonymity in an age of Big Brother. From the golden days of the Penet pseudononymous remailer, to Janet Reno's call to squelch Internet anonymity, anonymous remailers have played a vital and oft-hated role in making the 'Net safe from Big Brother. People regularly use anonymous remailers to avoid spam, to speak their minds without fear (of peers, family, employers, or governments), and to stay out of search engine indices. Like nearly any other technology, anonymous remailers can also be used by "criminals" to do "criminal" things. Under this guise, the government wishes to outlaw or severely restrict access to anonymous remailers. Remailers are not difficult to use. They're not prohibitively difficult to run, either. "The only way the public remailer network will survive, is if more people start setting up remailers. Even if all the current remailers never get shutdown by the Powers That Be [TM], people do tend to move, change lifestyles, pass on, lose their jobs or lose the time to run a remailer. Remailers go away. Change is the constant in life. We need more remops if the system is to survive." -- Shinn Remailer Operator. History, current status, and known attacks on Type I/II remailers will be the focus of the talk. noise holds a BS in CS from some university and will be attending her second year of law school this fall. she runs the noisebox anonymous remailer, helps the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and delights in holding heated debates with bureaucrats. noise thinks the world would be a better place (tm) if it had more cypherpunk lawyers. DEF CON 8.0 was held July 28th - 30th, 2000, in Las Vegas, Nevada USA

• published: 25 Feb 2014
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