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It's a service Helsingius, 33, happily provides, and since 1992 he has offered it free to anyone on the Internet, subsidizing it with income from his daytime job-providing Internet access to paying customers. Born to Swedish parents in Finland, where Swedes make up only 6% of the population, Helsingius knows what it feels like to be an outsider. Growing up near the former Soviet Union also gave him a taste of repression. Helsingius remembers learning as a child that people who owned typewriters or copiers in Russia had to register their machines and provide type samples to the government "for identification purposes." He came to fear that the online world could evolve into a Soviet police state, where every utterance is traceable.
Services like Penet have fast become a popular outlet for people with secrets to share. All sorts of people, it turns out, have an urge to communicate incognito. The Usenet newsgroup called alt.sex.bondage, for example, where people are encouraged to discuss some of the more esoteric sexual practices, is filled with messages sent through remailers.
But while anonymity can be liberating, it can also abet illicit activity. Penet has been used to send all sorts of contraband, from copyrighted articles to stolen software to hard-core pornography. Helsingius, who opposes thievery, put a limit on the size of the files that could be transmitted-killing two digital birds at once, since pornographic images are now too large to transport through Penet.
But text messages can be just as controversial as pictures. The Scientologists went to police after learning that someone had broken into one of their in-house computers, then anonymously posted a stolen file on alt.religion.scientology, a Usenet group where contentious current and ex-Scientologists spar.
The raid left Helsingius-and the people who have used his service-shaken. "They treated my computer and hard drive as if it were a gun," he said. It was, as far as he knows, the first time the wall of anonymity provided by the remailers had been breached. Can anybody be sure that the police, armed with search warrants from other aggrieved parties, won't be back? "I would hate to get caught up in the frenzy if and when investigators start anonymous witch hunts," a user wrote, requesting his removal from the data base. For now, Helsingius is staying online, bolstered by E-mail from hundreds of supporters. Most of these messages are signed.