http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/8762.html Faceless Freedom on the Net by Theta Pavis 7:30am 25.Nov.97.PST NEWPORT BEACH, California - When a whole weekend is dedicated to exploring the principles of electronic anonymity, some big concepts about basic human freedoms get thrown around. And though he has spent a lot of time in the past couple of years providing tools that allow people to maintain their privacy while communicating in the wide-open spaces of online communications, Lance Cottrell has seen the more mundane realities of the anonymity issue. A couple years back, Cottrell began distributing his Mixmaster anonymous remailer. The ability to tell the truth without announcing to the world, or reprisal-minded enemies, just who is speaking might be a cornerstone of digital freedom. But it also opens the door to those for whom anonymity is just a novel tool for pulling a nasty prank. Cottrell, who created Mixmaster while working on his physics doctorate at the University of California, San Diego, said the pure novelty of anonymous tools made them attractive at first. "People used them in abusive ways for the same reason people climb Mount Everest - because it's there," Cottrell said during a weekend-long conference here on the technical and philosophical underpinnings of electronic anonymity. The session, titled "Anonymous and Pseudonymous Communication on the Internet," was sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Cottrell, who describes himself as a "hard-line extremist in favor of anonymity," said the only real way to measure the problem is by looking at how many complaints there are about the use of software that protects a user's identity. The pattern Cottrell has seen suggests that as use of anonymous remailers and the like increases, complaints about faceless harassment and other abuses have declined. His simple thesis for the dip: Anonymity tools are quickly becoming familiar, and users are becoming more responsible in their use. Cottrell, who is also president of Infonex Internet Inc., owner of the popular Anonymizer email and Net access service, said that, given the deeper personal-freedom issues inherent in the anonymity issue, it's crucial that such services become profitable. "There's only 15 or 20 of them [anonymous remailers] in the world, and they're all run by volunteers. Those volunteers are under a lot of pressure and are taking significant risks," he said. Dealing with law enforcement requests for information comes with the territory, for instance. When confronted with such demands, Cottrell said, "We comply completely and give them everything we have - which is nothing. The FBI, so far, is content [to be given] log files with nothing useful in it." Overseas, police have tried to get information a "handful" of times, he said. Austrian and German agents have come to Infonex to find out who is hosting a Web site that includes Nazi propaganda - a site run by Austrians but illegal in their home country. But, Cottrell said, just as the people behind that site trust the company with their anonymity, so too can human rights organizations, which will increasingly be using anonymous remailers in the future. "Groups of people will be putting their lives in our hands, very literally," Cottrell said.