On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Daniel J. Boone wrote:
> Another design issue to take into account in building a payments mix system
> is that, unlike a message mix system, there is (at least in the United
> States) an obvious "legal" (as opposed to technical) attack against payment
> mix machine operators. Whereas message remailer operators are not obviously
> doing anything that could expose them to legal sanction, a payments mix
> machine operator could face a fairly plausible money laundering charge.
>
> The obvious implication, then, is that a payment mix should to be designed
> to conceal the identity of the operators of the nodes, whereas this is
> merely an optional feature in a message remailing system. Always assuming
> (never safe on this list) that the parties involved have pretty standard
> risk tolerances and are subject to US law or can be found in sympathetic
> jurisdictions.
Anonymous mailer operaters can most definitely be considered to be 'doing
anything' if it is found they're in the loop of a criminal investigation.
Why would any of the payment mix operators be 'doing anything' other than
the entry and exit points? All the data would be encrypted and unreadable
to all the intermediary machines. In an ideal world even the entry and
exit points should only receive encrypted (and therefor anonymous)
traffic.
To conceal the identity of the operators you'll need to conceal the
hostname, routing information, and physical location of the payment mix
machine itself. That would make it rather hard to locate, and use, I'd
think.
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