Josh Quitter recounts the sorry tale of a small-town city councilman whose phone number got attached to one of those phone-sex ads in alt.binaries.*. See <http://pathfinder.com/@@EGI8H7KFBQAAQAGs/time/magazine/domestic/1996/960401 /web.html> for full details. So, what does the councilman do? From the article:
On Feb. 6, at Suponcic's urging, the Willowick city council passed a resolution asking the state and federal governments to close the "loopholes" that allowed anonymous remailers to operate outside the authority of U.S. law-enforcement officials. "Once you've achieved one of these anonymous identities, you're dangerous, and there's no way law enforcement can track it," Suponcic says. "The animal's out of control."
Just like with "communications decency", watch out at the local level. -Paul