PGP: sequencing messages

[Chris Adams]

On 05/02/00 05:24:19 AM jdrabik@xmission.com wrote:

>Simple sequencing won't do - somebody can just remove the line
>(although it could be argued that if EVERY message is sequenced, and
>you can prove that, then you might argue to the court that the
>document has been tampered with, and that perhaps other tampering was
>performed too).

There's no way to get what you want without sending each message 
individually. If you did start including some unique identifier ("To: 
leak@isp.net"?) in the part of the message which is signed and write a script 
to sign each message separately, a message would either reveal the recipient 
or fail the integrity checks. Of course, if they balk at providing digital 
copies that might be time to point out how trivial it is to forge email and 
how the only way to prove that you did in fact say something would be to 
verify the digital signature.

If you can't get digital copy, the only thing left is slightly altering the 
contents of each message for each recipient. This has the best survivability 
rate but is also by far the most work. One approach would be a modified 
mailing list program that you would send some specially formatted message to 
containing multiple variants for various bits of text; the list software 
would assemble a message for each recipient and store a list of which 
combinations went to which people. This would require you to generate 
alternate versions for enough blocks of text to produce unique combinations 
for everyone on the list.

In theory you could produce some sort of script which could do this sort of 
thing for you but I'm doubtful it would be good enough to produce real 
sounding English consistently.

As a side question, have you contacted the newsmedia and groups like the 
ACLU? I don't think there's even the slightest chance of getting out of this 
without a lengthy court battle and it sounds like it'd be well worth getting 
other people to help fund it.
-- 
# Chris Adams <chris@improbable.org>

Iles's Law:
	There is always an easier way to do it.  When looking directly
at the easy way, especially for long periods, you will not see it.
Neither will Iles.