anon.penet.fi

» see anon.penet.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

anon.penet.fi was switched off two years before i got a modem, so everything here is reconstruction from other people's records. what it did is easy to state and was close to unprecedented when it started: you could post to usenet without your name on it, and people could still write back to you.

johan helsingius, known everywhere as julf, ran it from finland starting in 1993. the mechanism fits in a sentence. mail arriving at the server had its identifying headers stripped and was forwarded on under an address of the form an plus six digits at anon.penet.fi, and the server kept a table matching that address to your real one so that replies could be delivered back through it.

the table is the whole story of this grave. it is what made the service usable, because a remailer nobody can reply to is a one-way megaphone rather than a way to talk. it is also what made the service breakable, because a table exists somewhere and a court can ask for what exists.

by february 1995 it had around two hundred thousand users. by the end it had passed seven hundred thousand registered addresses and was moving roughly ten thousand messages a day, which in 1996 was a serious amount of mail through one man's machine. the traffic was support groups and whistleblowers and the ordinary usenet business of saying a thing without your employer finding out you said it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the first raid ~

in february 1995 the church of scientology went to interpol over documents it said had been stolen and posted through the remailer by a user signing as -AB-. finnish police turned up with a search warrant that covered the database. julf negotiated it down to the single record they were after and gave up that one address, which resolved to an account at caltech.

then he did the part that still reads well thirty years later. he announced what he had been forced to do on usenet on 18 february and put out a press release on the 21st, so that every one of his users learned inside a fortnight that the promise had a limit and roughly where the limit sat. most services that break a guarantee under legal pressure discover a reason not to mention it.

~ the second demand ~

the next demand came in the summer of 1996 and asked for two addresses at once. on 22 august the helsinki district court ordered him to disclose them. three days later the observer ran a piece describing the remailer as a channel for child pornography, which was wrong, and which julf afterwards said had nothing to do with what he decided next.

one detail from that round became doctrine for everybody who built anonymity tools afterwards. when the trail was followed past penet it ran into a different remailer that kept no mapping at all, and there it stopped, because there was nothing on that machine to hand over. penet could be compelled precisely because penet had kept something.

~ why he closed it ~

on 30 august 1996 he shut it down. the reason he gave was the court order rather than the newspaper: he would close the remailer for the time being, he wrote, because the legal issues concerning the internet in finland were as yet undefined. the finnish court of appeals stayed the disclosure order on 20 september, less than a month later, and he still did not reopen.

the logic of that is worth sitting with. the question was never whether he would win this particular case. it was that a service whose entire value is a promise cannot run on a promise that has to be relitigated every time somebody objects to a post. once the promise is conditional it is not the product any more.

~ what came after ~

the design lesson got absorbed immediately. the cypherpunk remailers that followed kept no mapping table at all, which cost them replies and bought them nothing to seize, and mixmaster chained several operators together so no single one of them knew both ends of a message. every anonymity system built since runs on the same rule: do not hold the thing you would be asked for.

helsingius took the eff pioneer award in march 1997. he had already co-founded eunet finland and had a hand in the first internet connection into the soviet union, and he went on to be chief technology officer at kpnqwest. the address format is the part that outlived everything else, an and six digits, still hanging off the end of arguments in usenet archives that nobody remembers having.

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