In the late 90s a subculture of techiedom flourished, though it never officially gave itself a name. It blended high-tech and especially the Internet with bits and pieces of Libertarianism (most especially, how to evade the taxman on the Net), utopianism (visions of a cyberculture free of earthly constraints), defiance of the government on privacy issues like encryption (my old buddies the CypherPunks), and even cryonic freezing in hopes of immortality. Sounds like a strange brew, but I was there, at the fringes, and met people who managed to incorporate the entire sprawling philosophical mess into their own beliefs.

The CypherPunks were, as the name suggests, focused on encryption and related privacy technologies. Two of the most important of those related techologies were anonymous remailers (computers that relay email messages while masking the source source address), and, of course, proxies. There was a network of CypherPunks setting up proxies and remailers all over the world, and mailing lists (through anonymous remailers, of course) that kept everybody abreast of progress, and publicized the addresses of new proxies and remailers. Whenever a new machine went online, the word spread, and all the right people "just somehow knew" about it. I haven't heard a peep about the CypherPunks in recent years--since 9/11 there's been a 180 and suddenly privacy isn't the hot topic it once was--but those people are still around and they certainly would not give up the fight for privacy so easily. To finally address your question, I think that the old (people) networks still function and the word still gets out...somehow, through mechanisms I don't particularly want to know about. Trust the techie underground...

Another unhappy consequence of 9/11 is that I don't feel I could trust a proxy any more unless I personally knew who set it up. It's uncanny how many proxies disappeared shortly after 9/11, and uncanny again how many new ones were set up to replace them. Some of the proxies are most certainly "honey pots"--proxies set up not to protect privacy, but to sucker people into directing traffic through them to be monitored by...somebody, most likely a Western government agency. Gary's characterization of proxies as used only by criminals and terrorists is way over the top (though the government loves that sort of hyperbole when it's attacking privacy), since many people with legitimate reasons to want privacy use them; but the concern isn't completely without merit. I'd expect monitoring of proxies.

Just call me NASA: Never A Short Answer