Venla Berg
Oy EDI Management Finland Ltd.
Venla.Berg@innopoli.fi
Anonymous services are important Internet services for implementation privacy. Privacy on the Internet means that outsiders don’t get to know to user’s actions on the Internet and that the details of users are not unnecessarily allowed to record and deliver. Securing freedom of speech on the Internet key issues are reasonable regulation of different communication modes and minimal control of message contents.
This paper is about implementation of privacy and freedom of speech on the Internet. These civil rigths are examined from two viewpoints: legal and technical. The target is clear up rights and responsibilities of the parties on the Internet.
Anonymous services and anonymous acting on the Internet are analysized relating privacy and freedom of speech. Anonymous servers, chaining and encryption are described from technical viewpoint.
Privacy of citizens is guaranteed to protect by Finnish Constitution. Private life is also protected by confidental communication protection. Rigths to collect and use information concerning citizens are regulated by laws of data security. Data security legislation defines, which information of persons is public and which is secure and how information is allowed to use.
Key issues of privacy on the Internet are data security: what information of users is allowed to collect, who is allowed to collect information of users, how information is allowed to use and how long information is allowed to store. Key issues are user identification and protection of communication on the Internet, as well.
Every time and anywhere acting on the Internet you leave calling cards. Most services keep logs of all visits. Your traces are a network address, an user id, a delivery address of electronic trading, a name of user, a bank account number, a credit card number, and so on. By analyzing these traces it is easy to classify users: what are you user interested in, what kind of things do you buy, whom do you send mails to, what kind of conversation do you participate, and so on.
Recipients, operators, service providers have traces of users. And outsiders as well can collect details of users by listening, following and collecting trafic of the Internet.
Allthoug the service doesn't require authentication information, network traffic reveals some details of user, for example
All of these dont't reveal the real user.
By using an anonymous service you can act on the Internet anonymously or pseudonymously.
There are two categories of anonymous services:
Anonymous services guarantee you that there are traces of your actions on few places on the Internet. Anonymous services make possible anonymous conversations as well.
People have basic need of privacy. Privacy has to be insured on the Internet as well. Privacy is needed in communication, transactions and information searching. By using an anonymous service a user can be sure about his/her privacy on the Internet. Privacy on the Internet means that outsiders don't get to know to user's actions on the Internet and that details of users are not unnecessarily allowed to record and deliver.
Need of anonymity can be attached to handling and conversations of serious personal problems, such as drinking problems, sexual problems, mental or physical abuse. Anonymous services can be general newsgroups or specialist services, such as medical, psychologist or aid services.
Anonymity is connected also with democracy and freedom of speech. It enables free and anonymous speech concerning for example political and religious opinions.
The Internet is used mainly to search information about products, service providers, information concerning work or hobbies or political and social information. A user have to be allowed and have possibility to search information anonymously.
A seller can not combine a buyer and a trade transaction, when cash is used. A seller gets information about a buyer, when a bank card or a credit card is used. On the Internet anonymous cash is needed as well. But after that problem is the delivery of goods. A buyer can't get the goods with him/her and walk away, the electronic or physical goods have to be delivered somewhere. Anonymous electronic goods delivering is possible by using anonymous services.
Anonymous services are implemented by cryptograpfy or/and anonymous servers. Cryptography can be used to protect messages againts outsiders. It also allows to protect chained addresses and makes messages untraceable. Anonymous servers are for electronic mailing or surfing the web. Anonymous servers are discussed in chapter 3.2 and 3.3.
Anonymous cash is implemented by cryptography. The seller and the bank can not combine used cash and the user, though they co-operate. An example of anonymous cash is Ecash.
We must not forget that anonymity is, as well, reached by forging the sender email address or IP address.
Remailers allows a user to send electronic mail to a news group or to a person without recipient knowing a name or a email address of the sender. Remailers take away an email address of the sender and send it to the recipient anonymously or pseudonymously. Some of remailers allow you to answer to the anonymous messages and some of them support cryptography. Cryptography can be used to protect messages and the email address of the recipient or the address chain to the recipient.
There are three types of remailers:
Cypherpunk and Mixmaster remailers are truly anonymous remailers. They provide much more privacy than Pseudonymous remailers. But they are much more harder to use than Pseudonymous ones.
A Cypherpunk remailer, sometimes referred to as Type I, sends the message to the recipient without even an anonymized return address on it. Some Cypherpunkt remailers allows to send messages to news groups as well. You can not answer to the message sended via Type I remailer.
A user can encrypt the messages sent to the remailer, and the remailer will decrypt them and send them on to the recipient, whose address is hidden inside the encrypted message. This means that someone monitoring outgoing mail of the sender can't see who the user is sending anonymous mail to. For even more security, remailers can be chained, in other words more than one remailer are used to send messages (Figure 1).
![[Figure of Remailer Chaining]](kuva1.gif)
Let us think we have a chain of three remailers: remailer Utopia next to sender, remailer Replay next to Utopia and remailer C2 next to Replay. The route of the message is sender-Utopia-Replay-C2-receiver.
Encryption of message is done as follows (Figure 2):
![[Figure of Chaining and Encryption]](kuva2.gif)
Now not even the remailers do not know who is sending mail to who, unless they co-operate. Encryption with chaining remailers means truly untreacable mailing on the Internet.
The more simply way to assure your privacy is encrypt the message with the public-key of the recipient and then send it to a news group. Nobody can know the sender either the recipient or the content of the message. Only the person than the message is meant to can open it.
Cypherpunk remailers do not keep logs of transactions.
Mixmaster remailers, sometimes referred to as Type II, give an alias name to the user or the user can choose an alias name him/herself. Remailers allows to answer to the messages. Otherwise Mixmaster remailers are similar to Cypherpunkt remailers.
A user has to create encrypted reply blocks, if he/she wants an answer to his/her message. A reply block contains instructions to reach user's real address. A reply block can be a part of the message you want to become answered or message without any other contents only for instructions to send mail to you. Creating an encrypted reply block is a similar action to that discussed above.
Let us again think the route of the message is sender-Utopia-Replay-C2-receiver.
Encryption of the reply block is done as follows (Figure 3):
![[Figure of Encrypting Reply Blocks]](kuva3.gif)
A pseudonymous remailer, sometimes referred to as Type III, simply takes away the email address of the sender, gives a pseudonym to the sender and sends the message to the intended recipient. The messages can be answered via the used remailer that sends the messages by checking the pseudonym. The messages can be sent to news groups and persons and the answer is possible in both case.
Finland based anon.penet.fi remailer of Johan Helsingius is type III remailer. The server does not support encryption and it keeps logs of all transactions. The server is closed because of the problems caused undefined rules governing the Internet and specially undefined rules consernig legal protection of electronic communication on the Internet.
A MiddleMan remailer can process Cypherpunk and Mixmaster remailer messages and has the complete funtionality that the original type-I-II remailers have. Where MiddleMan differs is instead of sending the message packet on to the next site, a user-defined (usually 2) number of remailers are padded into the chain.
By inserting random remailers into the chain, traffic analysis becomes much more difficult. Additionally, a MiddleMan remailer will never be on the end of the chain. One of the top reasons remailers retire is due to the ever increasing pressure from various directions due to messages exiting out of the final remailer to it's final destination (see Chapter 3.1.3). Since MiddleMan pads remailers to the end of the chain, a MiddleMan remailer is "safe" because it will never be on the end.
Some of remailers have WWW interface. It is a convinient, but not very secure, way to send anonymous messages with a form in a HTML document. The message and the final recipient are sent unencrypted to the WWW server used, so anyone listening in the connection to this server knows who is the sender and the recipient.
Surfing on the Internet is not anonymous. Every time a site is visited a user leave traces that reveals
There are two types of anonymous servers providing anonymous surfing on the Internet.
Anonymizer acts as a middleman between a user and the documents the user wants to retrieve. When a user wants to retrieve a document whose URL is http://xxx.com/, he prefixes that URL with the name of the Anonymizer server, and places his request to http://www.anonymizer.com:8080/http://xxx.com/. The server will retrieve the document from xxx.com, without revealing user's identity, and then send the document back to the user.
The protocols handled anonymously are
If other protocols, like https:, appear in the anonymized document the anonymizer will warn the user that it cannot handle it anonymously, and give the user the chance to retrieve it un-anonymously.
A user can configure his WWW browser so that the first page it opens up is opened using the Anonymizer. In this way surfing is always certainly anonymous. If the used service needs authentication the user need to provide his own authentication information, but the site won't know what host the user is coming from. The server does not keep any logs of who is accessing it.
Anonymizer is one example of this kind of anonymous server. There may be or will be similar ones on the Internet.
Anonymous surfing on the Internet can be implemented by so called kiosk service, which is used via modems and charged in phone bill. The user takes a call via telephone network to the service and service gives a random id to the user. By using the service surfing the web and reading the news is truly anonymous. Most of kiosk services do not allow a user to send mails.
The service is an anonymous server and the IP address given to the user is no real IP address. Example of the service is iNET OPEN of Telecom Finland. Helsinki Telephone Company is also implementing this kind of service.
The main purpose of kiosk services is not anonymity but easy access to Internet services.
Freedom of Speech is guaranteed by the Finnish constitution. According that everyone has right to express, make public and receive information, opinions and other messages without anybody preventing. Freedom of Speech is consernig everybody in Finnish jurisdiction. "Without anybody preventing" means that censoring is forbidden.
Freedom of Speech is joined with restrictions concernig quality of message content. This kind of contents are immorale, abusive or insulting or injurious againts private life. Contents of messages are regulated by criminal law.
Freedom of Speech is also regulated by press law. Ministry of Justice is preparing a proposal for reforming the law of freedom of speech.
Concerning freedom of speech on the Internet key issues are regulation of different communication modes and contents of messages.
Traditionally communication is divided to targeted and mass communication. The division is used to regulation of communication. Difference between targeted and mass communication is numer of recipients, which is restricted in targeted communication and unrestricted or large in mass communication. Targeted communication is confidential and it is protected by Finnish Constitution.
Third term used to describe communication is a public message. All public messages are not mass comuunication. For example if conversation carried on a public place is not tent to be confidental, it is a group of public messages.
A traditional example of targeted communication is telephone conversation. Examples od mass communication are publishing activities and radio broadcast. Emailing between two persons is targeted communication on the Internet. Telephone and video negotiations and news groups are targeted communication if amount of recipients is limited. Open news groups, WWW sites, electronic newspapers and audio-on demand as well as video-on-demand are mass communication on the Internet.
The Internet is changing modes of communication and new possibilities and modes arise. Division between mass and targeted communication can not be used to every case. The Internet diversifies communication, especially mass communication. Mass communication has typically been broadcasting, simplex transmission of publications by a media company. On the Internet public communication modes are as well delivering publications by private persons or interactive public communication for example conducted or free conversations on newsgroups.
In this paper regulation of network communication is discussed from the viewpoint of targeted and mass communication regulation.
A confidential message on the Internet is protected by Finnish Constitution. A message identifier is protocted as well. Protection is strengthened by criminal laws concerning message opening, listening and saving.
An outsider can get a confidential message sended on the Internet by a mistake. An obligation to protect privacy is needed for these cases. The similar regulation concerning private radio broadcast is written in radio law. According it an outsider may not save private broadcast, take advantage of its content or reveal content.
Message on the Internet are transferred by carriers like Post Office or a teleoperator. The carriers are Internet operators, value added service providers and internal server or transmission system mainteners. A confidential message is protected from traditional carriers (post and teleoperators) and their staff by Post and telecommunications law. The law is not applied to communication on the Internet. A confidential message protection on the internet by a Carrier has to be taken rank with post and telecommunications in the legislation.
There is no corresponding regulation concerning interference in protection of a confidential message by authorities to the regulation of telecommunications. That is why authorities can interfere in protection of Internet communication easier than traditional telecommunications. This does not follow principle of implement neutrality used in Finnish legislation. The regulation concerning interference in protection of Internet communication by authorities has to be taken rank with telecommunications.
A sender of the message is responsible for the message content. By using anonymous service a sender can secure his privacy.
Anonymous remailers chaining and encryption enable truly anonymous communication on the Internet. For privacy protection there is no reason to forbid or regulate chaining and encryption. Anyway it is impossible prevent in practice.
An operator transfering targeted messages may not supervise content of messages and operator is either responsible for content. A term common carrier used in the U.S. legislation should bring into use in the Finnish legislation too. A common carrier has no right to and no responsibility for content carried.
For realization of sender responsibility is crucial than the sender is traceable. In the certain situations teleoperators has an oblication to save identifiers of telephone calls by request of police or court. In these situations police is clearing up certain crimes.
Internet operator has no oblication to keep logs of Internet transactions. According to privacy protection legislation Internet operators have neither right in every respect to save transaction identifiers. Internet operators should have the similar oblication to keep logs of IP-traffic and value added service traffic.
Technical implementations of operators and service providers have great importance to privacy protection. At the moment data protection level of operators and service providers varies significally. Demands and responsibilities concerning data protection on the Internet should be specified.
Spheres of responsibilities concerning mass communication on the Internet are not as clear as in targeted communication.
According to legislation in force mass communication is linked up with secondary responsibility, obligation of correction and right to reply principles. Responsible for the message is besides or even substituting editoe, journalist or publisher.
Mass communication on the Internet has new features comparing with traditional mass communication. Regulation in force can not as such be applied to Internet. Modes of mass communication on the Internet have to be defined and evaluated. When can secondary responsibility be applied? How are obligation of correction and right to reply applied to Internet? What additional regulation is needed?
Ministry of Justice is preparing a proposal for reforming the law of freedom of speech. The new features of mass communication and public messages caused by Internet have to be taken into consideration in the reforming work.
Transfering and delivering messages (operators and service providers) can not cause secondary responsibility.
In the case of an anonymous public message the law can be interpreted as follows:
The message including its identifier information sended to an anonymous remailer are confident and protected by Finnish Constitution. The message sended without identifier information from the remailer to public is public message. So, the message identifier information is protected by Finnish Constitution.
Privacy of citizens is guaranteed to protect by Finnish Constitution. Privacy on the Internet should be guaranteed as well.
Privacy on the Internet means that outsiders don't get to know to user's actions on the Internet and that the details of users are not unnecessarily allowed to record and deliver. Rigths to collect and use information concerning citizens are regulated by laws of data security.
Anonymous services are important Internet services for implementation privacy. An anonymous service is a tool to secure privacy. Encryption with chaining remailers means truly untreacable mailing on the Internet.
Freedom of Speech is guaranteed by the Finnish constitution. According that everyone has right to express, make public and receive information, opinions and other messages without anybody preventing. Freedom of Speech is consernig everybody in Finnish jurisdiction.
Securing freedom of speech on the Internet key issues are reasonable regulation of different communication modes and minimal control of message contents.
Regulation in force linked up with secondary responsibility, obligation of correction and right to reply can not as such be applied to Internet.
| Cryptografy | Art or science of encoding data and keeping the message secret |
| Encryption | Encoding a message so that hides the contents from outsiders |
| Decryption | Retrieving the plaintext from ciphertext |
| Key | A key is usually used in encrypting, decrypting is only possible by knowing the key |
| Cryptography | Art or science of encoding data and keeping the message secret |
| Public key | A public key is used in public key cryptografy. Everyone has a pair of keys: public and secret. A public key is used in encryption and a secret key is used in decryption. |
| Anonymous service | By using anonymous service you can act anonymously or pseudonymously on the Internet |
| Public key | A public key is used in public key cryptografy. Everyone has a pair of keys: public and secret. A public key is used in encryption and a secret key is used in decryption. |
| Remailer | Anonymous servers for electronic mailing |
| Targeted communication | In targeted communication the number of recipients is restricted |
| Mass communication | In mass communication the number of recipients is unrestricted or large |