To the Editor:
Bored at Baker is useful for exchanging ideas that social pressure would keep you from exchanging if you had put your face to them. But it does not provide strong anonymity from an adversary like law enforcement.
The "military-grade encryption," as The Dartmouth quoted Jonathan Pappas saying it uses ("Bored at Baker stirs controversy"), means very little. If you watch the Internet connection from a student's dorm room, and you see some encrypted data sent to boredatbaker.com, and a message of about the same length appears on Bored at Baker, it's likely although not certain that you just discovered who wrote it without breaking any crypto.
Bored at Baker records a listing of all posts made by each user. Law enforcement could read all the posts of whoever posted the bomb message. They could also read "private" messages between that user and others, and users are often more open in these messages.
An account requires a working Dartmouth email address. Pappas claims to store only a hash of the address from which one cannot derive the address. However, there aren't many Dartmouth addresses, so to find the address of a user, law enforcement could feasibly compute the hashes of every one of a list of addresses in search of a match.
**Taylor Campbell '11
West Lebanon, N.H.*
