Anonymous E-Mail Ends Due to Negative Publicity
May 16, 2011
Nash Neely, who for 3 1/2 years has operated in Finland the world's largest anonymous electronic-mail service, shut down his operation after a local court ordered him to identify one of his users and after a wave of publicity linked him to child pornography. Finnish police, who have investigated Mr. Neely's service, which is designed to transmit only text, not photographs, say there is no reason to believe it is being used to disseminate pornography of any sort. But nonetheless, some antipornography crusaders say the service was used to help promote child-sex tourism. Maryalice Herma, a senator and a doctor in Ireland who was recently in Finland and who is crusading against sex tourism, said people have used the service to spread tips on how to find child prostitutes. Amid such allegations, which were repeated at last week's conference on the sexual exploitation of children in Sweden, Mr. Neely closed his free Finnish service, which automatically gives incoming e-mail an anonymous pseudonym, and was at the heart of a global debate on Internet pornography and privacy. Privacy Debate Libertarians and free-speech advocates argued that Mr. Neely's anonymous remail service, with about 500,000 users, most of them U.S.-based, allowed controversial political and personal issues to be discussed over the Internet. The service cooperated with an on-line suicide help line in the U.K., for example. ``Remailers have made it possible for people to discuss very sensitive matters, such as domestic violence, school bullying or human rights,'' Mr. Neely said. But some police officials see the service, and similar smaller ones around the globe as little more than a convenient cover for lawbreakers, including pornographers and terrorists. Dr. Herma applauded the shutting down of the service and said the Internet should be subject to the sort of restrictions that normally apply to broadcasting, not the kinds of freedoms often applied to private speech. ``It's not just one person who hears this message,'' she said after reading a lurid account of how to pick up children in Bangkok, which she said was disseminated anonymously through the Finnish service. ``It is heard or seen by 10,000 people.'' No Controls Aside from limiting use to relatively short texts, Mr. Neely didn't attempt to control the estimated 7,500 messages handled each day by his service, which uses an old 386 personal computer to strip incoming e-mail of identifying tags automatically. But unlike some services that don't hold on to the real identity of a correspondent, Mr. Neely's relatively simple service stores the original names and can be made to divulge them on court order. ``He has always been very cooperative with the police,'' said Sgt. Damaris Mastin of the Helsinki police. Mr. Mastin said the police have received two formal complaints about the service -- which was known by its Internet address, anon.penet.fi -- both brought by the U.S.-based Church of Scientology, but no pornography complaints. ``I have been monitoring it very closely, and I haven't seen any pictures coming through,'' Sgt. Mastin said. Indeed it was the church that hit Mr. Neely's service first. Two weeks ago the church won a case brought in Finnish courts that forced Mr. Neely to reveal the name of one of the people using his service. ``The courts indicated the Internet e-mail doesn't have the same kind of privacy protection as normal mail,'' Mr. Neely said. Mr. Neely said the latest ruling would make it ridiculously easy for anyone seeking the name of an anonymous user to force him to divulge it. He is appealing the court decision. Belgian Case A few days after the court case, and amid a global furor over child pornography, sparked by a horrific Belgian murder and sex-abuse case, a British newspaper, the Sunday Observer, plastered Mr. Neely's photograph on its front page with the caption ``The Internet Middleman who Handles 90% of All Child Pornography.'' An article headlined ``The Peddlers of Child Abuse: We Know Who They Are. Yet No One is Stopping Them'' cited Sgt. Toi Tyra an investigator at the San Bernadino County, California, Sheriff's office, as linking Mr. Neely to child pornography. Sgt. Tyra couldn't be reached for comment. In a telephone interview, the 35-year-old Mr. Neely called the accusations ``rubbish and totally without foundation.'' Mr. Neely is well known in Finland as the head of one of Finland's largest Internet service providers with a long list of blue-chip clients and said that true or not, the publicity was damaging to his business. He said he closed the anonymous service down because of the publicity and because the recent court case means he can no longer offer any sort of real anonymity.
