Cops and quarry, online on the Q.T.
The e-mails go out every day, millions of them, a flood of subversion and wickedness that the government would love to stop but can't.
The government of China, that is. And the government of Iran. Every day, their citizens receive the e-mails, enabling them to visit the most dangerous sites on the Internet, sites like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even that paragon of evil, Google.
The messages are sent by the Voice of America, our nation's international broadcast service, and they're made possible by Anonymizer Inc., a San Diego company that specializes in helping Internet users keep their secrets.
Anonymizer's business might once have raised the hackles of CIA hackers. After all, its customers can slip quietly around the Internet without leaving traces for counterspies and cops. But it turns out that secrecy is just as important for the good guys, and Anonymizer technology is a superb investigative tool.
''It's important to take control of your own information and be aware of how important it is," said Anonymizer president Lance Cottrell. Indeed, most Internet users haven't a clue how much they reveal simply by surfing the Web.
Every time you visit a Web page, your computer sends out data packets that contain the digital address of your machine. If you live in a totalitarian state, your rulers can easily sort through these packets to identify people who visit subversive websites.
But even in free countries, this data can be used against you. There is a good chance that the computer that hosts your favorite website is copying down the digital address of your machine. This data goes into a log that allows the site operator to track traffic patterns and identify visitors.
Maybe you don't want the site operators to know anything about you. Enter Anonymizer. For $29.95 a year, the company provides a bit of software that routes all your Web requests through Anonymizer's own computers. These machines replace your Internet address with their own.
''When you're surfing the Internet with Anonymizer and going to websites, you are completely anonymous with regard to the website," said Cottrell. So there is no record that your machine ever got anywhere near playboy.com.
Of course, there are more serious reasons to use Anonymizer. Here's one that will appeal to Tom Clancy fans: Submarines rarely turn on their sonar transmitters, because the noise will pinpoint the sub's location. Same thing for Web surfing.
Cottrell tells the story of one of his clients, a business that once planned to acquire another firm. The buyer did its homework, exhaustively studying the documents on the target company's website. But the spike in Web traffic, all from one company, alerted the target that it was in play.
''They were able to set up a bidding war," Cottrell said. ''The client company told us this error cost them about $15 million." Anonymizer might have saved them that money by concealing their effort.
Law enforcement and intelligence professionals also need a covert Web-surfing system.
''When you're going out and looking at the bad guys' website, they can see you," said Cottrell.
Say the CIA wants to visit a website known as an al Qaeda hangout. Punch up the site from a standard CIA computer, and the numerical address will pop up in the site's logs. It's easy to identify addresses belonging to government agencies; this information is in the public domain. But run the same query through Anonymizer, and it appears to have come from an uninteresting block of addresses owned by a major US Internet service. The bad guys remain in the dark.
Anonymizer users don't have to worry that a hacker could break into the system and learn who has been spying on whom. Cottrell said that his service doesn't keep track of customers' surfing habits.
''It's a requirement of many of our government law enforcement customers," Cottrell said. ''The only way to absolutely ensure security for our top security customers is to make sure that we never record information at all."
That's good news for Chinese and Iranian surfers who don't fancy a trip to the dungeons, but still want accurate world news. Anonymizer provides this by collecting millions of e-mail addresses. Every day, the company mails these people a Web link to a ''proxy" site that lets them anonymously visit practically any webpage on the planet. The only exception is porn, which remains blocked at government behest. The Chinese and Iranian governments can quickly modify their filters to block access to the proxy, but it changes every day, allowing a slow but steady leakage of freedom into two repressive societies.
Few of us have reason to care that our addresses are being logged as we surf; for apathetic souls, Anonymizer isn't worth the money. Besides, having to route each Web request through the Anonymizer system causes a small but uncomfortable slowdown in network performance. So if you have nothing to hide, it's probably not worth the bother. Still, it's good to know that whether you're in Boston or Beijing, you can keep your surfing to yourself.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
