Penet Remailer - Other Attacks

Other Attacks

Julf was also contacted by the government of Singapore as part of an effort to discover who was posting messages critical of the nation's government in the newsgroup soc.culture.singapore, but as Finnish law did not recognise any crime being committed, Julf was not required to reveal the user's identity.

In August 1996, a major British newspaper, The Observer, published an article describing the Penet remailer as a major hub of child pornography, quoting a United States FBI investigator named Toby Tyler as saying that Penet was responsible for between 75% and 90% of the child pornography being distributed on the Internet. Investigations by online journalist Declan McCullagh demonstrated many errors and omissions in the Observer article. In an article penned by McCullagh, the alleged FBI investigator described himself as a sergeant in California's San Bernardino sheriff's office who only consulted with the FBI from time to time, a relationship which the Observer article had in his opinion purposefully misrepresented as some kind of employment relationship. Tyler also claimed that the Observer purposely misquoted him, and he had actually said "that most child pornography posted to newsgroups does not go through remailers."

In addition, Julf claimed that he explained to the Observer the steps he took to prevent child pornography from being posted by forbidding posting to the alt.binaries newsgroups and limiting the size of messages to 16 kilobytes, too small to allow uuencoded binaries such as pictures to be posted. He also informed the Observer of an investigation already performed by the Finnish police which had found no evidence that child pornography was being remailed through Penet. Julf claims that all this information was ignored, stating that the Observer "wanted to make a story so they made things up."

Despite voluminous reader mail pointing to the numerous errors in the news story, the Observer never issued a full retraction of its claims, only going so far as to clarify that Johan Helsingius had "consistently denied" the claims of child pornography distribution.

In September 1996, the Church of Scientology again sought information from Julf as part of its court case against a critic of the Church named Grady Ward. The Church wanted to know if Ward had posted any information through the Penet remailer. Ward gave Julf explicit permission to reveal the extent of his alleged use of the Penet remailer, and Julf told the Church that he could find no evidence that Ward had ever used the Penet remailer at all.