The attached article was reposted to fight-censorship with the permission
of the Los Angeles Times, which ran it on the front page today.
It's a good story. Compare it to the Reuters dispatch, which yowled about
child porn but didn't even mention threats from the Church of Scientology:
>Finn To Close Net Remailer After Child Porn Claim
>
>HELSINKI - A Finnish Internet specialist said today he's closing his
>remailer, or anonymous forwarding system, after rejecting allegations
>it was being used as a conduit for child pornography. [...]
Note Esther Dyson's comments:
"The damage that can be done by anonymity is far bigger" than in
any other medium, said Esther Dyson, chairwoman of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. "In the end, you need to be able to get at
somebody's identity to enforce accountability, and the question is how
do you also enforce freedom of speech and freedom from prosecution for
unpopular opinions."
Also, on the "Mick Williams Cyberline" radio show I was on this
afternoon, we heard an unconfirmed report that Helsingius is suing the
Observer, but I haven't seen it on the wires yet...
-Declan
---
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, August 31, 1996
Internet Figure Pulls Plug (- 0p9)
on His Anonymity Service (- 0p6)
By AMY HARMON
TIMES STAFF WRITER Byline ends here.
Johan Helsingius, an Internet icon who for 3 1/2 years has
championed anonymous communication over the global computer network by
running a service that makes it possible, pulled the plug Friday on
the machine known as anon.penet.fi.
Civil liberties advocates said the move, prompted by a Finnish
court decision that the anonymity of the service could be breached by
court order, raised serious concerns about the future of anonymous
speech on the rapidly growing network.
A strong privacy ethic has prevailed on the Internet since its
early days as a tool for academics and the military. The network was
largely self-policed, and anonymous services--including
Helsingius'--explained to users that they were not to be used for
criminal activity, otherwise they would get shut down.
But the recent explosion of electronic commerce and community
has raised the stakes. Law enforcement agencies, as well as
anti-pornography advocates and many others, maintain that total
anonymity provides too much shelter for a variety of criminal
activities.
Based in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, Helsingius' service was
the biggest of its kind in the world, with more than half a million
users and with 7,500 messages passing through it each day.
Frequent users included suicide counseling groups, human rights
organizations and "anyone who wanted to discuss anything without their
neighbors and employers looking on," Helsingius said.
The amorphous structure of the Internet, which ignores
international boundaries, means that users throughout the world will
be affected by the shutdown. They will be offered the option of
revealing their true identities or finding another service--there are
about 40 others worldwide.
The idea of an anonymous remailer is to protect the
confidentiality of its users' identities. When a piece of e-mail was
sent to anon.penet.fi, its identifying information was stripped off
and a code number was substituted. The message was then forwarded to
the individual, mailing list or discussion group for which it was
intended.
The only link between the real and assumed identity resided on
the computer in Helsingius' home.
More sophisticated remailers use encryption software to create a
new identity and route messages through a string of several computers
around the world, never recording the transactions. That way no
individual operator has a record of the original sender.
But Helsingius' service was notable because it allowed others to
respond directly to the sender via the pseudonym on anon.penet. It
also did not require any special software programs--and it was free.
*
In a telephone interview Friday from Helsinki, the 35-year-old
Finn--known by his e-mail handle, Julf--said he was discouraged by the
court's interpretation of the communication privacy laws in a case
that involved a petition from the Church of Scientology, which wants
Helsingius to reveal the identity of an individual who is alleged to
have posted its copyrighted material on the Internet through
Helsingius' remailer.
"The court made it quite clear that the privacy of electronic
mail isn't covered in Finland anymore," Helsingius said. "I would be
running to the courtroom all the time because the suspicion of a
crime, however minor, would be enough grounds to get a court decision
to have the sender revealed. What's the point?"
The Scientologists' petition underlines the heightened
threat--and potential benefit--of anonymity on the Internet. While
anonymity is possible via traditional mail or over the telephone, the
Internet provides far greater reach for far less cost than any other
medium, and it is technically much harder to eavesdrop upon.
Helsingius, who has run the remailer in his spare time, has for
three years been fending off requests from law enforcement authorities
to discover the identity of his users. He was forced last February to
provide Finnish authorities with the name of a user who was alleged to
have broken into the church's computer to steal copyrighted
information.
The legal protection for digital anonymity has not yet been
tested in U.S. courts, but Internet legal experts expect that it will
be soon. The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is currently
seeking to restrict the application of the new Georgia Computer
Systems Protection Act, which broadly prohibits the use of pseudonyms
on the Internet.
The issue of how to deal with anonymity is a crucial one for
those trying to establish the medium as a place to work, play and live
in the coming decades.
Internet-spawned activists such as the Cypherpunks argue that
the system will collapse without a guarantee of secure and private
communication. And advances in cryptography have made that, for the
most part, technologically possible.
But other Internet enthusiasts disagree.
*
"The damage that can be done by anonymity is far bigger" than in
any other medium, said Esther Dyson, chairwoman of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. "In the end, you need to be able to get at
somebody's identity to enforce accountability, and the question is how
do you also enforce freedom of speech and freedom from prosecution for
unpopular opinions."
Anonymous services have in fact been used for
"mail-bombing"--crashing computer systems by overloading them with
e-mail--and for obscene postings to discussion groups that are
tantamount to broadcasting obscene phone calls.
Anti-pornography advocates have also begun to target anonymous
Internet services, which they blame for enabling the easy distribution
of illicit material over the network.
Last week, in a front-page headline, the London weekly newspaper
the Observer called Helsingius "the Internet middleman who handles 90%
of all child pornography."
Helsingius says the sensational article had nothing to do with
his decision, but he is clearly tired of the situation. Most anonymous
remailers, included anon.penet.fi, he says, filter out the
transmission of large image files that are likely to contain
pornographic pictures.
"I have personally been a target because of the remailer for
three years. Unjustified accusations affect both my job and my private
life," he said.
After setting up his server so that it can be used on a limited
basis by certain nonprofit groups, Helsingius plans to set up a task
force to discuss the practical problems related to ethical and civil
rights issues on the Internet.
Meanwhile, many Internet denizens mourned the passing of
anon.penet on Friday and hailed Helsingius as a "net.hero."
"This is a sad day in the history of the Net," wrote Declan
McCullagh, who runs a widely distributed electronic mailing list
called "fight-censorship." "Hundreds of thousands of people had
accounts on Julf's pseudonmyous server and many netizens relied on it
daily to preserve their privacy online."
"[Helsingius] has done a lot of good work. He's been attacked on
all sides, and he's hung in there," said Sameer Parekh, founder of
Community Connexion in Berkeley, which hopes to build a business out
of providing anonymous remailer services.
"It's too bad that he had to shut down. But we believe there's a
demand for anonymity, and use of these systems is only going to
increase."
BACKGROUND
Anonymous remailers make it possible to send messages over the
global Internet computer network without revealing who or where they
come from. Anyone with an Internet account can contact a remailer
service and register for an account. Then, when sending electronic
mail or posting messages to an electronic discussion group, the
subscriber addresses it to the remailer as well as to the final
destination. The message travels to the remailer computer, which
automatically strips off the originating name and address and forwards
it to the final destination. Some remailers also allow the recipient
of an anonymous message to respond anonymously, so that the entire
exchange is "double-blind."
Copyright 1996, Los Angeles Times
###
