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IP: Julf gave up.
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 21:00:23 -0400
By John Schwartz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, September 16 1996; Page F19 The Washington Post Julf gave up. Johan "Julf" Helsingius did more with anonymity than even Joe Klein, the now-unmasked author of the novel "Primary Colors." A 35-year-old native of Finland, Helsingius set up one of the Internet's most controversial sites: a "remailer" that allowed people to send e-mail and post messages anonymously. And on Aug. 31, he pulled the plug, fearful of running afoul of Finnish privacy law. Here's how his service worked: Users would send Internet messages through his computer, and it would strip away the return address from the message, replace it with a unique ID to allow replies, and pass the message along to the intended recipient. Helsingius told me he shut down the service because changes in Finnish law had left the level of privacy protection for electronic mail "unclear," making him vulnerable to having to reveal identities of his users. He expects new legislation to reinstate the protections, but says for now he cannot go on. Helsingius offered the service for free, giving up hours a day and spending about $500 a month from his earnings at an Internet services company. He says he he did it out of deeply held beliefs about privacy and individual rights. "People have crazier hobbies," he said jokingly in a phone call last week. Privacy advocates applauded Helsingius for starting the first easy-to-use remailer. In their eyes, it was a rare expansion of rights in an age marked by narrowing. To many people, though, Net anonymity sounded like a terrible idea -- a recipe for malice and mischief and cowardice. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wei\senthal Center in Los Angeles said that although he supports open discourse on the Internet, he worries that anonymity provides a cloak for purveyors of hate. In the real world, Cooper said, "if you're going to go and drive by somebody and shout `dirty Jew' or `dirty nigger,' then part of the cost of that act is somebody is going to read your license plate." Along with freedom, Cooper said, should come responsibility -- he used terms like the Hebrew "Derekh eretz," the call for proper respect in discourse that traditionally kept spirited discussions over religious issues from flying apart. "The whole notion of anonymity, in my mind, flies in the face of developing a community." The technology is new, but the issues are old. In his work the "Republic," Plato warned that any man given the power to become invisible would not be able to resist doing evil. "A man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever anyone thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust." America's courts have disagreed, however -- at least when it comes to anonymous political debate. In April last year the U.S Supreme Court said that anonymity can be a force for good, and is too important to squelch. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority." In doing so, he was echoing the earlier arguments of Justice Hugo Black, who in a similar 1960 case noted, "Even the Federalist Papers, written in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under fictitious names." Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in the Ohio case, arguing that he couldn't imagine "why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability. . . ." With such a long history of controversy surrounding these issues, it was inevitable that Helsingius's work would bring him under attack. He has been repeatedly accused of providing cover for the lowest of the low: child pornographers. Most recently, an article in London's weekly Observer identified Helsingius as "the Internet middleman who handles 90 percent of all child pornography." There's only one problem: It doesn't seem to be true. The American police officer quoted in that account has since said that he was misquoted, and that very little child porn is sent through remailers. Helsingius had worked with a Finnish police officer to prevent child pornographers from using his service, in part by limiting the size of messages below the size of most photos. In an electronic mail response to my questions, Jouko Salo, deputy chief of Helsinki's police department of criminal investigation, wrote, "We have not found that there has been any large posting of child pornography" on Helsingius's service. Other attacks have come from the Church of Scientology. Last February, angered by anonymous criticism of the church and publication of copyrighted documents, the church got the Finnish legal system to force Julf to reveal the identity of one of his users, whom church officials suspected of having stolen private documents. Good or bad, the service has been very heavily used since Helsingius started it in 1992. "I was surprised when the first 10,000 users showed up," he told me. "I was really surprised when the first 100,000 users showed up." When hepulled the plug, there were 700,000. Certainly, a lot of people who have the option of anonymity use it to say foul, stupid or hurtful things. And Helsingius readily admits that his service has been used by people who post messages to sexually-oriented discussion groups but want to indulge their erotic interests without risking, er, exposure. But Helsingius has seen other uses too. Dissidents in countries without freedom of expression have engaged in democratic debate without the fear that what they say could land family members in prison. Whistleblowers have used it, and an organization that calls itself the Samaritans conducts a suicide outreach program by electronic mail and draws people who might not seek counseling by name. Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is advising Helsingius about litigation options against the British newspaper. According to Godwin, the long-running furor over the service "isn't really about anonymity at all." Instead, he attributes the depth of feeling about the case to "a general fear of the rate of change in society." Other remailers -- many more secure -- are out there. But Helsingius made the idea famous, and had more users than all the rest combined. The passing of his service is like the passing of a historical figure -- one who may have done some good and some bad, but who made a difference in any case. Schwartz can be reached at schwartj () twp com
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