[Cryptography] Mail Lists In the Post-Snowden Era

[Devin Reade]

--On Monday, October 21, 2013 03:04:18 PM -0400 grarpamp 
<grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org> wrote:
>> At the risk of stating the obvious, going to an anonymized list
>> is not without its own problems.  One big part of the usability of
>> many mailing lists involves the reputation of the poster. [...]
>
> Some people have a desperate need for the State to validate
> other people's names and faces and lives before they feel comfy.
> Other people are just fine with knowing them (and by whatever
> moniker) in the context in which they know them. A list full of
> crackpots running on the hidden undernets is just as easily
> validated as one in the real world... it's a question of content and
> how well developed in whichever world (or both) the context is.

My comment had nothing to do with any state's ability to ID people.
It has to do more with peer review. If I'm trying to evaluate
ideas and opinions within my own fields of expertise, I can do it
on my own.  If I'm trying to evaluate something outside my own field,
I'm more dependent on the experts in that field, how their peers
evaluate those ideas, and ultimately the reputation of the related
parties.  While I concede that reputation can be built for any
arbitrary avatar over time, without links back to the Real World
that reputation will be harder and take longer to build.

>> As an aside, on a public list or bulletin board (anonymous or not)
>> I would be surprised if there is not software in existence that
>> could correlate poster's mannerisms against publicly available
>> non-anonymized postings to in effect de-anonymize the supposedly
>> anonymous postings with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
>
> Don't post in both worlds. Or do. Or post your face or name
> or whatever else, or not. It's your choice. In a hidden medium
> others can make their own choices. Confusing?, not feeling
> comfy? ... then stay Stateside.

"Confusing" and "comfy" is irrelevent, as is whether or not one is
stateside (I'm not). That aside was questioning, in light of a
determined anagonist, whether it is even really possible to retain
anonymity on mailing lists if one posts a significant amount of
content in both worlds, by whatever name. By extension, this is
questioning the value of an anonymous mailing list at all (assuming
your antagonist is able to get the cleartext).


Devin