Wired: Faceless Freedom on the Net

[nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)]

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/8762.html

     Faceless Freedom on the Net
     by Theta Pavis 

     7:30am  25.Nov.97.PST
     NEWPORT BEACH, California - When a whole weekend is dedicated
     to exploring the principles of electronic anonymity, some big concepts
     about basic human freedoms get thrown around. And though he has
     spent a lot of time in the past couple of years providing tools that
     allow people to maintain their privacy while communicating in the
     wide-open spaces of online communications, Lance Cottrell has seen
     the more mundane realities of the anonymity issue. 

     A couple years back, Cottrell began distributing his Mixmaster
     anonymous remailer. The ability to tell the truth without announcing
     to the world, or reprisal-minded enemies, just who is speaking might
     be a cornerstone of digital freedom. But it also opens the door to those
     for whom anonymity is just a novel tool for pulling a nasty prank. 

     Cottrell, who created Mixmaster while working on his physics
     doctorate at the University of California, San Diego, said the pure
     novelty of anonymous tools made them attractive at first. 

     "People used them in abusive ways for the same reason people climb
     Mount Everest - because it's there," Cottrell said during a
     weekend-long conference here on the technical and philosophical
     underpinnings of electronic anonymity. The session, titled
     "Anonymous and Pseudonymous Communication on the Internet," was
     sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of
     Science. 

     Cottrell, who describes himself as a "hard-line extremist in favor of
     anonymity," said the only real way to measure the problem is by
     looking at how many complaints there are about the use of software
     that protects a user's identity. 

     The pattern Cottrell has seen suggests that as use of anonymous
     remailers and the like increases, complaints about faceless harassment
     and other abuses have declined. His simple thesis for the dip:
     Anonymity tools are quickly becoming familiar, and users are
     becoming more responsible in their use. 

     Cottrell, who is also president of Infonex Internet Inc., owner of the
     popular Anonymizer email and Net access service, said that, given the
     deeper personal-freedom issues inherent in the anonymity issue, it's
     crucial that such services become profitable. 

     "There's only 15 or 20 of them [anonymous remailers] in the world, and
     they're all run by volunteers. Those volunteers are under a lot of
     pressure and are taking significant risks," he said. 

     Dealing with law enforcement requests for information comes with the
     territory, for instance. When confronted with such demands, Cottrell
     said, "We comply completely and give them everything we have -
     which is nothing. The FBI, so far, is content [to be given] log files with
     nothing useful in it." 

     Overseas, police have tried to get information a "handful" of times, he
     said. Austrian and German agents have come to Infonex to find out who
     is hosting a Web site that includes Nazi propaganda - a site run by
     Austrians but illegal in their home country. 

     But, Cottrell said, just as the people behind that site trust the company
     with their anonymity, so too can human rights organizations, which
     will increasingly be using anonymous remailers in the future. 

     "Groups of people will be putting their lives in our hands, very
     literally," Cottrell said.