Online, but out of sight: Anonymity gets more popular
Part One of Two
New York Times NEW YORK It may be easy to forget that there are people who want to remain anonymous on the Web while the online world is full of those who happily post pictures of themselves and their navels for all to see.
But interest in software that allows people to send e-mail messages that cannot be traced to their source or to maintain anonymous blogs has quietly increased over the last few years, say experts who monitor Internet security and privacy.
"People in the world are more interested in anonymity now than they were in the 1990s," when the popularity of the Internet first surged, said Chris Palmer, technology manager at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco dedicated to protecting issues like free speech on the Web.
Increasingly, consumers appear to be downloading free anonymity software like Tor, which makes it harder to trace visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms back to their authors.
Sales are also up at companies like Anonymizer.com, which among other things sells software that protects anonymity.
"I get the feeling it's going up," said Roger Dingledine, Tor's project leader. "But one of the features I've been adding recently," he said, enhances anonymity protection by making it harder to count downloads of the software. Still, the number of servers forming layers in the Tor network has risen to 300 from 50 in the last year, Dingledine added.
A few reasons exist for the surge, which is hard to measure - it is nearly impossible to track how many people have made themselves invisible online. People who want to continue to swap music via the Internet but fear lawsuits brought by the recording industry want to hide their identity.
Some people wish to describe personal experiences that could land them in jail. And some Web authors share their thoughts about repressive regimes and face government reprisal if they are caught.
"The more equipment is acquired and produced by a repressive regime, the more important anonymity is," said Julien Pain, who heads the Internet freedom desk for Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group that supports press freedom. The group has produced a guide, www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542, for bloggers trying to protect their identities.
"We realized that bloggers were being arrested everywhere in the world," Pain said. One blogger in Nepal, for example, may risk arrest with every time he comments on the country's monarchy, he said.
"The problem is, you have on one side states with a lot of money," he said. "On the other side, you have small businesses" and nongovernmental organizations. Law enforcement or other government agencies have tremendous legal and technological resources to discover the identities and locations of people communicating online, though consumer software can make the task more difficult.
Despite the increased interest in anonymity, software companies have moved away from marketing products that protect identities, said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's office in San Francisco, a public research group that focuses on privacy and free speech issues.
"When I came into this field, it was on the heels of the failure of a number of companies that tried very hard to create privacy-enhancing technologies," Hoofnagle said.
Now, though, people are more concerned about defenses that block unwanted e-mail messages and hackers seeking to steal bank accounts, credit card numbers or whole identities, said Alex Fowler, co-head of the national privacy practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
