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Re: Councilman/Usenet porn case...
Here is an example of what anonymous remailers can
do.......
>
>
>
> TIME Magazine
>
> April 1, 1996 Volume 147, No. 14
> _________________________________________________________________
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> Return to Contents page
> _________________________________________________________________
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>
> WAY WRONG NUMBER
>
> HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A CITY COUNCILMAN PORNED
>
>
>
> JOSHUA QUITTNER
>
> This is a tale about how an online prank grows into an international
> incident. It also goes a long way toward explaining the fear many
> non-Internet people have about this out-of-control thing called
> cyberspace.
>
> Our story begins on the banks of Lake Erie, in Willowick, Ohio (pop.
> 15,469). It is the last Monday night in January, about 9 o'clock. City
> councilman Frank Suponcic is home with his wife Linda when the phone
> rings. Linda answers. "Hi, this is Mike," says the man at the other
> end, politely enough. Linda chats with Mike, figuring he must be a
> constituent. (As Willowick's longest-serving ward councilman, Suponcic
> has lots of voters calling him at home.) After a while, Mike asks for
> Annette. Linda tells him he has the wrong number. Mike apologizes and
> hangs up.
>
> The phone rings again at 11:30 p.m. And again. And again. Wrong
> numbers until 4:30 a.m. A weary Suponcic wonders what's up and checks
> the Caller-ID logs on his phone. The first call was from British
> Columbia. The next was from Connecticut. There was one from
> Indianapolis and a few from California. Clearly these are not
> constituents. But who are they?
>
> Suponcic calls the Canadian back--it is now 5:30 a.m. in that time
> zone, and he is only too happy to wake the dude up--and he demands to
> know what is going on. The guy explains, vaguely, that he was merely
> answering an "ad on the Internet. You know, the one about horny
> housewives..."
>
> So now we have a problem. Suponcic, like a lot of people, has a new
> computer. But like most people, he hardly knows what the Internet is.
> Now, somewhere there's an ad on it. For horny housewives. With his
> home phone number.
>
> That night, when the next wrong number came in, Suponcic interrogated
> the caller and learned that the councilman's phone number was printed
> at the bottom of some pictures of naked women that had been posted to
> a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, which,
> naturally, Suponcic had never heard of. But he had a friend in
> Cleveland who was something of a computer buff. So the next day the
> two of them jacked into Usenet and spent three hours sifting through
> about 7,400 files on alt. binaries.etc.
>
> Eventually, they found two with Suponcic's phone number. One featured
> a topless brunet wearing only a string of pearls and offering phone
> calls for "as low as 87 [cents] per minute." The other showed a blond
> woman advertising "hot amateur wives ready for you from there [sic]
> own bed." Yikes.
>
> Over the next week, Suponcic received more than 75 calls a day from
> lusty Netizens. "You just could not make phone calls," says the
> exasperated councilman. "And when you went to bed, you had to take
> your phone off the hook."
>
> It was the sorcerer's apprentice scenario, and there was no way to
> stop it.
>
> Suponcic, being a public official, knew his way around the local
> police department, and soon a detective started pounding the Net. By
> tracing the header information on the Usenet postings, the detective
> determined--O.K., this part is murky, we admit--that the messages had
> originated in Ohio, passed through Florida Online, an Internet
> provider in the Sunshine State, and then through anon.penet.fi, a free
> E-mail remailer service based in Finland that allows Internet users to
> post messages anonymously.
>
> The identity of the poster was, and is, unknown, though Suponcic has
> his suspicions. "It's my personal belief that the root of this is
> political," says the councilman, who had to get an unlisted telephone
> number and whose wife now wants to move.
>
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> But here's a reality check. The Finnish remailer could not have been
> used, since anon.penet.fi no longer transmits binary image files.
> Jerry Russell, who runs Florida Online and who looked into the case,
> says he figures the whole thing was a relatively simple prank called a
> sendmail spoof, in which the prankster posts a message with a phony
> return address. He says the Willowick police never produced a copy of
> the posting for him so that he could unravel the tangle for them.
> Indeed, when the policeman called, "he didn't really understand what
> he was trying to tell me," says Russell. "The average Joe Blow police
> detective doesn't know flip about the Internet."
>
> Neither does the average public official. And that, friends, is why
> stuff like the Communications Decency Act--the Christian Coalition's
> attempt to remove pornography from the Internet--sails through
> Congress.
>
> --With reporting by Noah Robischon/New York
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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