ONE persistent scapegoat in the latest round of Internet scare stories is "anonymous" e mail.
Because anonymous remailers (also known as "anonymous servers") let you send e mail someone without them knowing your name or e mail address, well, anybody could be doing it.
It could be used by anyone from drug smugglers and "digital bankrobbers" to paedophiles or paramilitaries. So these services have been targeted in many of the current round of stories about online defamation, mischief and mayhem.
True, anonymous remailers do open up the technical possibilities of everything from sexual harassment to long distance death threats; yet despite their bad reputation, anonymous remailers have noble origins and a wide range of benevolent uses.
It's a bit like the way people take confidentiality and anonymity for granted in older communications technologies such as the telephone - many ordinary people can get deeply upset when services such as Caller ID come on the scene.
Suppose, say, you're a designer who wants to draw attention to serious flaws in your product but voicing these opinions in public would be a sackable offence. Or you want to reply by e mail to a job posting on the World Wide Web but don't want to jeopardise your current position.
These are fairly mundane examples, but anonymous remailers are also regarded as essential by victims of child abuse who want to exchange electronic messages. They can also mean the difference between life and death for those living in totalitarian regimes which outlaw the expression of oppositional views on political or religious issues - especially in such a public domain as the Internet.
Even in more democratic societies, users might be paranoid about their state security service's Big Brother tendencies. Or you could - and probably, should be seriously concerned about how e mail monitoring is just one part of a chain of data collecting. Various agencies now specialise in collating the fragments of personal information which you generate every time make a digital transaction, and sell the resulting profiles to marketing organisations, credit agencies and the like.
If you do want to use an anonymous remailer, it's worth keeping the following checklist in mind:
. The remailer should be easy to use;
. It should be run by a reliable individual whose system does what it promises (as opposed to say, a government sting operation designed to entrap people or, worse still, a criminal scam)
. This person running the remailer should have the expertise to take prudent steps to safeguard your privacy from private corporations and government agencies;
. Having said that, there is very, little from stopping hackers breaking into most remailers without their administrators knowing about it;
. The remailer should forward your messages in a timely manner - within minutes or hours;
. But it should also have a random time lag before doing this - making it harder for snoopers to link a message that arrives at, say, 3 p.m. with a message that leaves your terminal at 2.58
. In this day and age the service should both allow and encourage the use of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy encryption software). If it doesn't, how do you know that this intermediary doesn't enjoy peeking into the mail?
. At the end of the day, if you really want total privacy, ask yourself whether it's worth the bother of using both PGP and an entire chain of remailers, so that only the first remailer knows your real address - and cannot know the message's final destination.
. Finally, if you are dealing in incredibly confidential information, even if the remailer is automated you can't assume that the person who runs your own e mail system won't intercept your secret messages to and from the remailer.
Such is the strain on resources and staff time that public remailer services tend to come and go like desert blooms. They also have to cope with the headache of "spamming", or sending large scale junk mail such as "Get Rich Quick" chain letters.
A good guide to current remailers can usually be found in the Usenet newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server