The Penet remailer (anon.penet.fi) was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. It offered Internet users the ability to shield their identities when, for instance, posting messages to Usenet newsgroups. The Penet remailer was one of the first remailers, was very popular, and had a wide following. It also had some critics. A pseudonymous remailer or nym server, as opposed to an anonymous remailer, is an Internet software program designed to allow people to write anonymous messages on Usenet newsgroups and send anonymous email under a pseudonym. ... Johan Julf Helsingius, born in Finland, started and ran the Anon. ... 1993 is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...

Several times, Helsingius was contacted by various people and individuals who wanted him to reveal the identities of certain people using the remailer to post anonymous messages. He was contacted once by the government of Singapore, as part of an effort to discover who was posting messages critical of the nation's government.

Helsingius refused all requests to reveal the identities of the users of his remailer, until the Church of Scientology used the legal system to force him to reveal the identity of one person who had posted a Scientology document to the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology in January of 1995. As part of its campaign against Internet users, Scientology obtained a court order, and police arrived at Helsingius' residence to seize the remailer. Initially he was asked to turn over the identities of all users of his remailer (which numbered over 300,000 at the time), but he managed a compromise and revealed only the single user being sought by the Church of Scientology. Official Scientology Cross Symbol The Church of Scientology was founded by author L. Ron Hubbard as an organization dedicated to the practice of Scientology, an applied religious philosophy formulated by Hubbard. ... A Scientology Center on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California Scientology is a system of beliefs, teachings and rituals, originally established as an alternative psychotherapy in 1952 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, then recharacterized by him in 1953 as an applied religious philosophy. ... The newsgroup alt. ... January is the first month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar and one of seven Gregorian months with the length of 31 days. ... 1995 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Scientology versus the Internet is the colloquial term for a long-running online dispute between the Church of Scientology and a number of the Churchs online critics. ...

In August 1996, a major British newspaper, The Observer, published an article accusing the Penet remailer of being used to post child pornography anonymously to Usenet newsgroups. This claim was proven to be false, because the remailer had an upper limit to the size of a file that could be posted through it. (The vast majority of picture files, including the claimed child pornography, were larger than the limit imposed by the remailer -- no more than 15,360 bytes or 15K.) 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... The term child pornography (sometimes referred to as kiddie porn) generally refers to pornography featuring a child; however, the precise definition of pornography and child varies by region and country. ...

Helsingius successfully defended his remailer in court against the Church of Scientology's further attempts to obtain the identities of its users, but felt that the legal system in Finland would not, or could not, provide adequate protection against further legal attacks. As a result, he closed the remailer in September of 1996. 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...

Because of the use of the legal system to attack the anonymity Penet offered to its users (and other attacks against anonymity elsewhere), more sophisticated anonymity networks were developed, like Type I Nymservers, of which not even the operator of the server can know the real identity of a pseudonym holder. This is made possible by using cryptography and anonymous remailers such as cypherpunk remailers and Mixmaster. The sender can create a chain of such remailers for a message so that no remailer can have access to information about both the sender and the recipient of the message. A nym server (short for pseudonym server) is a server that provides an untraceable e-mail address, such that neither the nym server operator nor the operators of the remailers involved can discover which nym corresponds to which real identity. ... Cryptography has had a long and colourful history. ... An anonymous remailer is a server computer which receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and which forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. ... A Cypherpunk anonymous remailer is an anonymous remailer that takes messages encrypted with PGP or GPG, or in some cases in plain text, and forwards it removing any identity information from the header. ... Mixmaster is an anonymous remailer which sends messages in fixed-size packets and reorders them, preventing anyone watching the messages go in and out of remailers from tracing them. ...

References

• Helmers, Sabine (September 1997) A Brief History of anon.penet.fi - The Legendary Anonymous Remailer CMC Magazine.
• Post, David G. (April 1996). "The First Internet War". Reason Magazine (transcription).
• 1996 EFF press release concerning litigation against Helsingius
• Google archive of an144108's Usenet postings