>> Does it ever occur to you Greg that one of your customers might well
>> say with exactly the same degree of conviction as yourself, "99.9% of
>> self-appointed censors have no business making decisions that limit
>> the freedom of others and they should not be permitted to do so." ?
>
>Whoa there! Nobody said anything about censorship but you! Well, I did
>mention before that what I've proposed is not censorship in any way.
>Perhaps you disagree, but I think you'll find it hard to show that
>directing one specific style of user communications through a known
>channel is a good long way from any form of true censorship, esp. when
>the user is still fully capable of using public key and secret
>cryptograhpy to completely mask the content of his message from not only
>the provider's mailer but from anyone and everyone along the wire.
I am not quite sure where I stand on this argument in general, but I
will point out that all packets going through an ISP can be filtered or
examined in any way, if the ISP so chooses. So, whether E-mail is
being relayed through an ISP at the message level or at the IP packet
level makes no theoretical difference in privacy. There are some
practical differences in the difficulty of examining packets versus
messages, but those differences are not that large.
So, as a user, you are forced either to put some amount of trust in
your ISP, or you will need to use encryption. That said, it may be
possible to block who the end-user recipient is, if the ISP is used as
a packet relay and if the recipient addresses in the SMTP transaction
itself are encrypted somehow. There are internet-tunneling mechanisms
that do this (for all traffic between two sites) but a mechanism that
encrypts this kind of data would be unlikely to use port number 25,
since special software is required at both ends.
--
Ronald S. Karr
tron |-<=>-| tron@???
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