Google webmaster tools already verify if the owner is for real. The disavow tool is 'safe' in this sense, and requests to remove links sent via email are definitely not safe in this sense (that's why I never comply with those, for all I know I'm aiding some black hat by killing backlinks of a legitimate site).
True, but that still leaves other search engines in the dark about which links should be ignored. I thought disavow.txt might be a better solution to help us avoid The Destruction of the Web.
Good point, of course there are other search engines too and in a way a 'webmaster / search engine' interface that requires webmasters to have direct contact with a search engine when the same thing could be fixed by something the crawler could pick up is less elegant. I had not thought this through when I wrote my reply to you, you are absolutely right.
