IP: Julf gave up.

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

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