REQUIEM FOR A GO-BETWEEN

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The news echoed dully across Usenet last week, like the sound of a body being dropped to the floor. It traveled first from Finland across the Net and then bounced instantly to wired people everywhere in the world. If you like, you can experience that doomed moment yourself--it's still frozen there on the newsgroups that convene to comfort people in troubled times. On alt.sex.abuse.recovery, for instance, you'll find a discussion that begins with the subject line "The End of Penet.fi.

Penet.fi needs no translation for most of the people on that newsgroup. The name is shorthand for an E-mail address--anon.penet.fi--where a garden-variety 486-chipped PC lived for nearly four years. This modest machine performed a lofty task: it allowed people effortlessly to send and receive E-mail or post messages to newsgroups, anonymously.

A person trying to recover from sex abuse might use it; so might a rehabilitating sex offender. Alcoholics and whistle-blowers relied on anon.penet.fi all the time, as did software engineers afraid to ask "stupid" questions, political refugees, gay teenagers and anyone else who feared personal retaliation. And so we mark its passing with some sadness.

Johan Helsingius, a Finn who lives near Helsinki, had run anon.penet.fi as a hobby since November 1993, mainly because he loves the idea of truly free speech. There are now a dozen of these so-called anonymous remailers around the world, but Helsingius' is the oldest, best known and largest, having served more than half a million people. Anon.penet.fi and its owner are also the most notorious; together they survived E-mail "bombings" that threatened to bury the computer under millions of pages of garbage, death threats and even a recent scurrilous report in the London Observer that linked the service to child-porn traffickers--an accusation that Finnish authorities said was groundless. But in the end, it was the lawyers who caused Helsingius to sever anon.penet.fi from the Net.

Late last month a Finnish court ruled that Helsingius must divulge the true E-mail address of a penet.fi user who posted to a newsgroup what the Church of Scientology claims are copyrighted secrets. He has 30 days in which to comply or appeal, and his lawyers are optimistic. But for now, and perhaps forever, anon.penet.fi is unplugged because, as Helsingius puts it, "there's no real protection for free speech on the Internet in Finland."

The shutdown naturally distresses a great many people who now must bury old personas and migrate to new remailers. "There's a freedom to speak when you're anonymous," says a 39-year-old woman, a frequent poster to alt.sex.recovery who had used Helsingius' service since its inception. For years her deepest confidants knew her as an145396@anon.penet.fi That cloak of anonymity allowed her to communicate honestly with people for what she says was the first time in her life. Anon.penet.fi allowed lots of people to be heard. Doubtless, some of them will now revert to silence, waiting for the courts to figure out that the Net deserves protection of the right to speak freely.

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