March 6, 1995 Volume 145, No. 9
TECHNOLOGY
UNMASKED ON THE NET
The Finns raid a computer that ferries anonymous messages. Now users fear their secrets are at risk BY JOSHUA QUITTNER Johan Helsingius' personal computer may be the most loathed machine in cyberspace. Cranks routinely E-mail bomb it, trying to level the IBM clone with millions of pages of gibberish. Hot-headed hackers dispatch bit-eating "worm" programs to Helsinki to search for and destroy the computer's precious electronic cargo. A few vengeful folks have even threatened Helsingius himself, for what would the machine be without the man?

But for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, Helsingius' computer - and the service it provides - is a glorious haven. Known technically as an anonymous remailer, it is the network equivalent of a Swiss bank: a conduit by which users can ship data around the world in complete anonymity. Dozens of anonymous remailers have sprouted up in recent years - many of them in Scandinavia - but none is as popular or as trusted as Helsingius' service, known as Penet. For the past three years, networkers around the world have used his node on the Internet as a transfer point for the most sensitive and explosive information, secure in the assurance that it could never be traced back to them.

Three weeks ago, all that changed when the Finnish police, who were acting on a complaint from the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, served a search-and-seize warrant on Helsingius, demanding that he turn over the real name of one of his users. Caught by surprise, Helsingius gave them what they asked for. It was either that, he said, or give them his entire computer.

That rip in the curtain of privacy is certain to send a chill through cyberspace: Helsingius has become the keeper of the Who's Who of the computer underground. Stored in his 200-megabyte data base is a master list of the names and E-mail addresses of everybody who has ever sought the shelter of his service: pornographers and political exiles; software pirates and corporate whistle blowers; the sexually abused and their abusers.

The need for anonymous remailers stems from the design of the Internet, which tags every packet of data with an electronic address so it can be returned or re-sent if something goes wrong in transit. The system works, but it offers no comfort to those who want to preserve their privacy.

Remailers ensure anonymity by separating messages from their return addresses. It's simple: say Peter wants to send an anonymous message to Paul. Instead of mailing it directly, he sends the message to Helsingius' machine, putting Paul's address on the first line of text. Helsingius' computer automatically strips off Peter's name and return address, replaces them with a new, randomly assigned address, and forwards the message to Paul. When he gets the message, Paul has no way of telling who sent it, though he can correspond with the secret sender by sending a reply in care of Helsingius' Penet.

It's a service Helsingius, 33, happily provides, and since 1992 he has offered it free to anyone on the Internet, subsidizing it with income from his daytime job - providing Internet access to paying customers. Born to Swedish parents in Finland, where Swedes make up only 6% of the population, Helsingius knows what it feels like to be an outsider. Growing up near the former Soviet Union also gave him a taste of repression. Helsingius remembers learning as a child that people who owned typewriters or copiers in Russia had to register their machines and provide type samples to the government "for identification purposes." He came to fear that the online world could evolve into a Soviet police state, where every utterance is traceable.

Services like Penet have fast become a popular outlet for people with secrets to share. All sorts of people, it turns out, have an urge to communicate incognito. The Usenet newsgroup called alt.sex.bondage, for example, where people are encouraged to discuss some of the more esoteric sexual practices, is filled with messages sent through remailers.

But while anonymity can be liberating, it can also abet illicit activity.

Penet has been used to send all sorts of contraband, from copyrighted articles to stolen software to hard-core pornography. Helsingius, who opposes thievery, put a limit on the size of the files that could be transmitted - killing two digital birds at once, since pornographic images are now too large to transport through Penet.

But text messages can be just as controversial as pictures. The Scientologists went to police after learning that someone had broken into one of their in-house computers, then anonymously posted a stolen file on alt.religion.scientology, a Usenet group where contentious current and ex-Scientologists spar.

The raid left Helsingius - and the people who have used his service - shaken. "They treated my computer and hard drive as if it were a gun," he said. It was, as far as he knows, the first time the wall of anonymity provided by the remailers had been breached. Can anybody be sure that the police, armed with search warrants from other aggrieved parties, won't be back? "I would hate to get caught up in the frenzy if and when investigators start anonymous witch hunts," a user wrote, requesting his removal from the data base. For now, Helsingius is staying online, bolstered by E-mail from hundreds of supporters. Most of these messages are signed.

Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

>TECHNOLOGY
>UNMASKED ON THE NET
>The Finns raid a computer that ferries anonymous messages. Now users fear
>their secrets are at risk
>BY JOSHUA QUITTNER
Quittner is a bit clueless.

>Johan Helsingius' personal computer may be the most loathed machine in
>cyberspace. Cranks routinely E-mail bomb it, trying to level the IBM clone
>with millions of pages of gibberish. Hot-headed hackers dispatch bit-eating
>"worm" programs to Helsinki to search for and destroy the computer's
>precious electronic cargo. A few vengeful folks have even threatened
>Helsingius himself, for what would the machine be without the man?
>But for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, Helsingius'
>computer - and the service it provides - is a glorious haven. Known
>technically as an anonymous remailer, it is the network equivalent of a
>Swiss bank: a conduit by which users can ship data around the world in
>complete anonymity. Dozens of anonymous remailers have sprouted up in recent
>years - many of them in Scandinavia - but none is as popular or as trusted
>as Helsingius' service, known as Penet. For the past three years, networkers
>around the world have used his node on the Internet as a transfer point for
>the most sensitive and explosive information, secure in the assurance that
>it could never be traced back to them.
Anon.penet.fi was not an anonymous remailer. It was a pseudonymity server.

It was specifically doomed to be compromised eventually because of the fact it kept files linking each user to their "real" email address. This was a bad paradigm, and Mixmaster remailers operate under much better principles.

ptsc

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