Sgt. Toby Tyler is actually a bit of a cypherpunk. He told me he "absolutely" supports anonymous remailers -- repressive governments in Asia and all that. He just doesn't think that many people will use 'em. -Declan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 05:55:26 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: U.K. cyberporn fearstorm, Singapore attacks Julf, from HotWired [Also in today's Netizen on HotWired is a report from India on their Net-regulations and Brock in Muckraker on the White House's new "Key Recovery Initiative" anti-crypto legislation. Check out http://www.hotwired.com/ --Declan] ********** http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/36/index4a.html HotWired, The Netizen 6-8 Sept 96 Finnish Line by Declan McCullagh Washington, DC, 5 September Call it a cyberporn fear-storm: Splashed across the front page of the 25 August issue of the London Observer was a hysterical report naming Finnish pseudonymous remailer operator Julf Helsingius as the "man US police-experts charge with being at the hub of 90 percent of the child pornography on the Internet." The report continued: "'Somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all the child pornography I see is supplied through this remailer,' said Toby Tyler of the FBI." That was enough to make Helsingius - already reeling under threats from the Singapore government and repeated legal attacks from the always-litigious Church of Scientology - pull the plug on his anon.penet.fi site last Friday. But in trying to milk the story, the Observer went too far. The "FBI investigator" the paper cited as their only support for the accusations doesn't exist. In truth, Tyler is a sergeant in California's San Bernardino sheriff's office, and he says the Observer intentionally misrepresented his identity and his statements. Tyler says "there's very little of the story I agree with," and the Observer took a conversation he had with a reporter "and selectively chose words that would mean what they wanted." [...] Helsingius blames the Observer for scaremongering. "It was quite clear that they were trying to create a story where there was none ... I quite clearly outlined why my server wasn't transmitting child porn," Helsingius said. "I stated that the Finnish police had investigated and found that it wasn't. These comments were ignored. They wanted to make a story so they made things up." [...] Still, a malicious front-page splash in the Observer isn't the full extent of Helsingius's troubles. Now he's also up against the Singapore government, which has demanded the identity of one of the users in his half-million-person database... The unknown user, who has the email address an511172@anon.penet.fi, posted hundreds of messages to the soc.culture.singapore newsgroup under the name of "Lee Kwan Yew," the retired prime minister of Singapore. The messages are short and unimaginative, yet apparently are just enough to piss off the thin-skinned Singaporean officials. One post reads: "We are small and vulnerable. Without regulations, we will be like Hong Kong, oops, fuck, bad example, they are actually doing quite all right. - SM Lee Kwan Yew, Republic of Singapore." Now that a Finnish court recently ruled that the remailer's database could be breached in a Scientology case, Helsingius says he's not sure what might happen. In the meantime, he's stuck somewhere between a sensationalist British newspaper and a Singaporean government bent on silencing opposition. [...] Links from the article: Linkname: hysterical report in London Observer Filename: http://www.scallywag.com/obtext.htm Linkname: Singapore banning Web pages Filename: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/sg/ Linkname: hundreds of messages pseudonymously posted Filename: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/sg/anon.posts.090596.txt ###