Word: helsingius
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...Johan Helsingius, a Finn who lives near Helsinki, had run anon.penet.fi as a hobby since November 1993, mainly because he loves the idea of truly free speech. There are now a dozen of these so-called anonymous remailers around the world, but Helsingius' is the oldest, best known and largest, having served more than half a million people. Anon.penet.fi and its owner are also the most notorious; together they survived E-mail "bombings" that threatened to bury the computer under millions of pages of garbage, death threats and even a recent scurrilous report in the London Observer that linked...
Late last month a Finnish court ruled that Helsingius must divulge the true E-mail address of a penet.fi user who posted to a newsgroup what the Church of Scientology claims are copyrighted secrets. He has 30 days in which to comply or appeal, and his lawyers are optimistic. But for now, and perhaps forever, anon.penet.fi is unplugged because, as Helsingius puts it, "there's no real protection for free speech on the Internet in Finland...
...shutdown naturally distresses a great many people who now must bury old personas and migrate to new remailers. "There's a freedom to speak when you're anonymous," says a 39-year-old woman, a frequent poster to alt.sex.recovery who had used Helsingius' service since its inception. For years her deepest confidants knew her as an145396@anon.penet.fi That cloak of anonymity allowed her to communicate honestly with people for what she says was the first time in her life. Anon.penet.fi allowed lots of people to be heard. Doubtless, some of them will now revert to silence, waiting for the courts...
Still not content, Suponcic contacted Steven LaTourette, the U.S. Congressman who represents his district. LaTourette's staff suspects that the problem lies with Julf Helsingius, the Finn who runs the anonymous remailer. They wrote a letter to the Finnish ambassador and sent copies to the Secretary of State and the chairman of the House Committee on International Relations. The State Department agreed last week to look into the complaint...
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...