From: "Vincent S. Gunville" <vingun@rgalex.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 03:20:32 +0800
To: cohen@chuma.cas.usf.edu
Subject: Re: Councilman/Usenet porn case...
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960327121637.17983A-100000@rwd.goucher.edu>
Message-ID: <315AB3E4.41B6@rgalex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Here is an example of what anonymous remailers can 
do.......
> 
> 
> 
>    TIME Magazine
> 
>    April 1, 1996 Volume 147, No. 14
>      _________________________________________________________________
> 
>    Return to Contents page
>      _________________________________________________________________
> 
> 
> WAY WRONG NUMBER
> 
>   HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A CITY COUNCILMAN PORNED
> 
> 
> 
>    JOSHUA QUITTNER
> 
>    This is a tale about how an online prank grows into an international
>    incident. It also goes a long way toward explaining the fear many
>    non-Internet people have about this out-of-control thing called
>    cyberspace.
> 
>    Our story begins on the banks of Lake Erie, in Willowick, Ohio (pop.
>    15,469). It is the last Monday night in January, about 9 o'clock. City
>    councilman Frank Suponcic is home with his wife Linda when the phone
>    rings. Linda answers. "Hi, this is Mike," says the man at the other
>    end, politely enough. Linda chats with Mike, figuring he must be a
>    constituent. (As Willowick's longest-serving ward councilman, Suponcic
>    has lots of voters calling him at home.) After a while, Mike asks for
>    Annette. Linda tells him he has the wrong number. Mike apologizes and
>    hangs up.
> 
>    The phone rings again at 11:30 p.m. And again. And again. Wrong
>    numbers until 4:30 a.m. A weary Suponcic wonders what's up and checks
>    the Caller-ID logs on his phone. The first call was from British
>    Columbia. The next was from Connecticut. There was one from
>    Indianapolis and a few from California. Clearly these are not
>    constituents. But who are they?
> 
>    Suponcic calls the Canadian back--it is now 5:30 a.m. in that time
>    zone, and he is only too happy to wake the dude up--and he demands to
>    know what is going on. The guy explains, vaguely, that he was merely
>    answering an "ad on the Internet. You know, the one about horny
>    housewives..."
> 
>    So now we have a problem. Suponcic, like a lot of people, has a new
>    computer. But like most people, he hardly knows what the Internet is.
>    Now, somewhere there's an ad on it. For horny housewives. With his
>    home phone number.
> 
>    That night, when the next wrong number came in, Suponcic interrogated
>    the caller and learned that the councilman's phone number was printed
>    at the bottom of some pictures of naked women that had been posted to
>    a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, which,
>    naturally, Suponcic had never heard of. But he had a friend in
>    Cleveland who was something of a computer buff. So the next day the
>    two of them jacked into Usenet and spent three hours sifting through
>    about 7,400 files on alt. binaries.etc.
> 
>    Eventually, they found two with Suponcic's phone number. One featured
>    a topless brunet wearing only a string of pearls and offering phone
>    calls for "as low as 87 [cents] per minute." The other showed a blond
>    woman advertising "hot amateur wives ready for you from there [sic]
>    own bed." Yikes.
> 
>    Over the next week, Suponcic received more than 75 calls a day from
>    lusty Netizens. "You just could not make phone calls," says the
>    exasperated councilman. "And when you went to bed, you had to take
>    your phone off the hook."
> 
>    It was the sorcerer's apprentice scenario, and there was no way to
>    stop it.
> 
>    Suponcic, being a public official, knew his way around the local
>    police department, and soon a detective started pounding the Net. By
>    tracing the header information on the Usenet postings, the detective
>    determined--O.K., this part is murky, we admit--that the messages had
>    originated in Ohio, passed through Florida Online, an Internet
>    provider in the Sunshine State, and then through anon.penet.fi, a free
>    E-mail remailer service based in Finland that allows Internet users to
>    post messages anonymously.
> 
>    The identity of the poster was, and is, unknown, though Suponcic has
>    his suspicions. "It's my personal belief that the root of this is
>    political," says the councilman, who had to get an unlisted telephone
>    number and whose wife now wants to move.
> 
>    On Feb. 6, at Suponcic's urging, the Willowick city council passed a
>    resolution asking the state and federal governments to close the
>    "loopholes" that allowed anonymous remailers to operate outside the
>    authority of U.S. law-enforcement officials. "Once you've achieved one
>    of these anonymous identities, you're dangerous, and there's no way
>    law enforcement can track it," Suponcic says. "The animal's out of
>    control."
> 
>    Still not content, Suponcic contacted Steven LaTourette, the U.S.
>    Congressman who represents his district. LaTourette's staff suspects
>    that the problem lies with Julf Helsingius, the Finn who runs the
>    anonymous remailer. They wrote a letter to the Finnish ambassador and
>    sent copies to the Secretary of State and the chairman of the House
>    Committee on International Relations. The State Department agreed last
>    week to look into the complaint.
> 
>    But here's a reality check. The Finnish remailer could not have been
>    used, since anon.penet.fi no longer transmits binary image files.
>    Jerry Russell, who runs Florida Online and who looked into the case,
>    says he figures the whole thing was a relatively simple prank called a
>    sendmail spoof, in which the prankster posts a message with a phony
>    return address. He says the Willowick police never produced a copy of
>    the posting for him so that he could unravel the tangle for them.
>    Indeed, when the policeman called, "he didn't really understand what
>    he was trying to tell me," says Russell. "The average Joe Blow police
>    detective doesn't know flip about the Internet."
> 
>    Neither does the average public official. And that, friends, is why
>    stuff like the Communications Decency Act--the Christian Coalition's
>    attempt to remove pornography from the Internet--sails through
>    Congress.
> 
>    --With reporting by Noah Robischon/New York
> 
>      _________________________________________________________________
> 
> 
>    [IMAGE]
> 
>    Text Only

-- 
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|Vincent S. Gunville     
|Robbins-Gioia		 
|209 Madison St                       Email  vingun@rgalex.com
|Alexandria, Va 22314    
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