April 8, 1999
STATE OF THE ART / PETER H. LEWIS
Internet Hide and Seek: Staying Under
Cover
ASHINGTON -- He did his best to remain anonymous, but
within days after an expert programmer released the Melissa
computer virus into the world late last month, the police reported that his
identity had been cracked. Investigators used a tracking mechanism the
Microsoft Corporation had secretly installed in its Office software to
gather information on its customers surreptitiously.
In Yugoslavia, meanwhile, messages
poured onto the Internet from the
war zone, providing what appeared
to be firsthand accounts of Serbian
atrocities against ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo. Privacy advocates realized
that if the Serbian authorities were
able to trace the identities of the
writers, many lives could be lost.
Ominously, messages from some
writers had stopped suddenly.
The privacy groups moved swiftly to
provide the writers with special
access to Anonymizer.com, an
Internet service that allows users to
be anonymous and untraceable online, and with information about PGP,
a data encryption program so strong that the United States prohibits its
export.
These two cases, worlds apart, underscore a growing dilemma that now
confronts the electronic world. "Anonymity has incontestable value in a
huge number of situations, and it is constitutionally protected," said Philip
Reitinger, a prosecutor for the Justice Department, speaking at a
Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here today. Moments
later, during a panel discussion, he added, "If you're serious about
prosecuting crime on the global communications infrastructure, you have
to have traceability.
"Should communications on the Internet be traceable in some
circumstances? And if so, what should the rules be?"
The issue is a broad one because anonymity is not of interest only to
criminals and dissidents, and not available only to the technically astute.
New technologies are emerging that enable even casual Internet users to
be anonymous online for the first time. At the same time, new
technologies are being deployed to gather ever more personal
information from users.
In recent weeks, a debate has emerged over new technologies that have
been deployed to allow companies to track individual users on the
Internet. The Intel Corporation embedded a unique identification number
in its Pentium III processor that would enable network operators to
identify individual computers on the Internet, and the Microsoft
Corporation designed a "globally unique identifier" that secretly appears
in Microsoft Office documents and can be used to trace files back to a
specific person. The Microsoft Office identification number was used in
the Melissa investigation.
Some privacy tools are being simplified and made available commercially
to a broad audience, allowing anyone to browse the World Wide Web
and use E-mail without being identified. The technologies are morally
neutral. They could be used, for example, to commit a crime or to report
one anonymously. The tools, like the Anonymizer
(www.anonymizer.com), are also useful simply for browsing the Web
without having to give up personal information to marketers, for visiting
sex-related Web sites without potential embarrassment, posting
messages on newsgroups using pseudonyms and for avoiding spam, the
bulk-mail advertising pitches that advertisers send incessantly to E-mail
addresses they have culled from the Net.
"The Internet has shifted the balance away from privacy, and these are
attempts to bring it back," said David Banisar, an officer of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org).
There are other anonymity systems in the works.
AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey, a system called Crowds is being
tested that operates on the premise, familiar to any New Yorker, that one
can be anonymous in a crowd. In the Crowds system, large groups of
geographically dispersed Internet users would be able to band together
and their individual Web page requests would be randomly forwarded
through a shared computer called a proxy server. The operator of the
Web site would not know which member of the crowd submitted the
request, and neither would anyone else in the crowd. More information is
available at www.research.att.com/projects/crowds.
At the Lucent Corporation's Bell
Labs, another anonymity system
called the Lucent Personalized Web
Assistant allows a Web user to create
a pseudonym for each Web site; the
same pseudonym would be used on
each visit. The Web site operator
would not know the visitor's true
identity but could still build a profile of the user's preferences that could
be used to tailor advertisements and content to the customer on
subsequent visits. More information about Lucent's system is available at
www.lpwa.com.
Yet another anonymity system under development, this one at the
Government's Naval Research Laboratory, is Onion Routing. An Onion
Router (www.onion-router.net) hides not only the content of messages,
but also the very fact that two people are communicating over a public
network.
One of the more intriguing anonymity services under development is
Freedom, a Windows program developed by a Canadian company,
Zero Knowledge Systems (www.zeroknowledge.com). Freedom, which
is expected to be available for public testing next month, is similar to the
Lucent system in that it enables users to establish pseudonyms that are
consistent over time. That would allow a user to participate freely in a
discussion group without worrying about being identified.
Freedom is expected to cost $50 a year for five separate digital
pseudonyms (extra identities are $10 a year). These on-line personas
cannot be traced to reveal the user's identity.
The technical details of the system, including strong data encryption,
masked Internet addresses and proxy servers, are hidden behind a
simple user interface, which I've tried in early form. After a user chooses
a persona by clicking on it, all identifying information is stripped from the
original request and replaced by the information created for the
pseudonym.
Millions of Internet users already employ pseudonyms; America Online,
for example, calls them screen names and allows each subscriber to have
several. But in most cases a pseudonym can be traced to its real owner,
often when the Internet company is compelled by a court order to divulge
the information or is tricked into doing so.
For example, the giant defense contractor Raytheon Corporation sued
more than 20 employees earlier this year for posting pseudonymous
messages about the company on the Internet. At least two employees
resigned after Yahoo, in response to a court subpoena, revealed the true
identities behind the postings. Ray-theon asserts that the messages, which
contained gossip and criticisms of the company, divulged proprietary and
confidential information.
With Freedom, not even Zero Knowledge Systems can link the
pseudonyms to a user's real identity. The company knows only that the
person has a Freedom account.
The oldest commercial service offering anonymity, and the only one
currently available to users of any Internet-connected computer, is
Anonymizer.com. Unlike Freedom, Anonymizer does not require the
user to download or install any special software. For a fee of $5 a month,
users can process Web browsing requests and send messages through
Anonymizer's proxy servers. (There is also an unlimited free browsing
service, but Anonymizer inserts a delay, typically 10 seconds, on page
views in the free service. The paid service has no delays.) For an extra
fee, Anonymizer will also allow users to receive E-mail responses and set
up Web pages.
In either case, the user types the address of the Web site to be visited,
and the request is sent to Anonymizer's proxy computer. The proxy strips
off the customer's identifying information and forwards the request to the
Web site, which knows only that the request is coming from Anonymizer.
The page or graphics file is then returned to the user's computer, and the
site can be bookmarked for return visits with the anonymity intact.
If a company is tracking Web usage by its employees -- which the courts
have ruled is legally permissible, along with reading employees' E-mail
and listening to their phone calls -- it will see only that the user is
connected to Anonymizer.com, but it will not be able to find out what
sites are being visited. For that reason, a number of companies prohibit
employee access to the Anonymizer site. Other companies use
Anonymizer regularly to visit the Web sites of competitors and gather
information, and law enforcement agencies use it routinely to check up on
people under investigation.
At the other end of the line, some commercial sites do not allow
connections from Anonymizer, either because they require visitors to
provide personal information before granting them access or because
they have had bad experiences with Anonymizer users who abused the
system with bogus credit card scams or harassing messages. Anonymizer
was forced to block its users' access to the White House Web site
because customers were sending threats to the President.
Anonymizer boots out customers who try to use the system to send
batches of spam, or in response to complaints from people being
harassed through the site.
As with all of the anonymous services now being developed for the
Internet, the good has to be balanced with the bad.
"The real world is routinely anonymous," said Lance Cottrell,
Anonymizer's chief executive. "When you drive down the street, typically
there is no one photographing your license plate, no one keeping track of
where you park and how long you stay. What's unusual about the
Internet is that everything is by default logged and tracked. What's
aberrant is not the presence of anonymity on the Internet, but that you
have to take special steps to achieve it."
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