Johan Helsingius' personal computer may be the most loathed machine in cyberspace. Cranks routinely E-mail bomb it, trying to level the IBM clone with millions of pages of gibberish. Hot-headed hackers dispatch bit-eating "worm" programs to Helsinki to search for and destroy the computer's precious electronic cargo. A few vengeful folks have even threatened Helsingius himself, for what would the machine be without the man?
But for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, Helsingius' computer-and the service it provides-is a glorious haven. Known technically as an anonymous remailer, it is the network equivalent of a Swiss bank: a conduit by which users can ship data around the world in complete anonymity. Dozens of anonymous remailers have sprouted up in recent years-many of them in Scandinavia -but none is as popular or as trusted as Helsingius' service, known as Penet. For the past three years, networkers around the world have used his node on the Internet as a transfer point for the most sensitive and explosive information, secure in the assurance that it could never be traced back to them.
Three weeks ago, all that changed when the Finnish police, who were acting on a complaint from the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, served a search-and-seize warrant on Helsingius, demanding that he turn over the real name of one of his users. Caught by surprise, Helsingius gave them what they asked for. It was either that, he said, or give them his entire computer.
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 so it can be returned or re-sent if something goes wrong in transit. The system works, but it offers no comfort to those who want to preserve their privacy. Remailers ensure anonymity by separating messages from their return addresses. It's simple: say Peter wants to send an anonymous message to Paul. Instead of mailing it directly, he sends the message to Helsingius' machine, putting Paul's address on the first line of text. Helsingius' computer automatically strips off Peter's name and return address, replaces them with a new, randomly assigned address, and forwards the message to Paul. When he gets the message, Paul has no way of telling who sent it, though he can correspond with the secret sender by sending a reply in care of Helsingius' Penet.