On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
> 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.
Yes. This is why I think it is important that even the senders of
anonymous mail not be able to prove after message delivery that a
particular message went through a particular remailer. Preferably
not be able to prove, ever, but you can always seize the entire remailer
chain and follow the message step by step.
> 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.
I was under the impression that payment mixes were to be built on top of
existing, non-anonymous payment schemes. That is, if we have a chain of
payments mix servers Alice-Bob-Carol --- Yeltsin-Zelda, each of them
has an account whose activity is tracked by some bank.
The payments made between Alice and Bob, or Bob and Carol, and so on,
can be audited by the bank. Now, the bank may not have access to the
instructions which tell Bob to send $X to Carol (this is the encrypted
data you're writing about) -- but he will see that Bob receives lots
of money and then forwards lots of that money onwards. This will
raise suspicion for Bob; I don't know money laundering laws well enough to
say if it is actually illegal.
Does anyone know of a good survey/introduction of money laundering laws?
Paper is fine.
Thanks much,
-David Molnar
