Anyone who's going to be attending USENIX the week after next will want to make sure not to miss the privacy panel, to be held Friday afternoon (First session after lunch, I think). The topic to be discussed is anonymity on the net... Here's the official announcement: USENIX SUMMER 1993 TECHNICAL CONFERENCE June 21 -25, 1993 Cincinnati, Ohio Privacy Panel: Anonymity Servers - Finding The Bounds of Rights This USENIX Panel session will address anonymity servers, systems serving to sanitize e-mail and NetNews postings in order to conceal the source. We will explore the legal and ethical issues involved, and try to shed some light on the subtle complexities involving "the bounds of rights" such systems pose. Some of the issues are considerably more complex than they might first appear. Our panel will consist of Dan Appelman, John Gilmore, Johan ("Julf") Helsingius, and will be convened by Mike O'Dell. Biographies of the participants follow. Dan Appelman, Panelist Dan Appelman is a lawyer who practices computer and telecommunications law from his office in Palo Alto, California. He also teaches a course in telecommunications policy, law and regulation and has written and lectured about the legal issues in both the telecommunications and data processing industries. Dan is the lawyer the USENIX Association and several other amusing high-tech enterprises. He is a partner in the law firm of Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe. John Gilmore, Panelist Among his other interests and accomplishments, John Gilmore is a dedicated champion of civil liberties in cyberspace. John was a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has campaigned aggressively for public availability of high-quality encryption systems. He was employee number five at Sun Microsystems, may well have written more APL interpreters than any other single human, and his most recent business venture is the founding of Cygnus Support, a software support company dedicated to the commercial viability of free software. He notes that he has never had time to attend college or buy a suit. Johan Helsingius, Panelist The last time anyone really referred to Johan Helsingius using his family name was while he was doing his military service long ago. As the memories are not too fond, he prefers to be called "Julf", a name based on a play on words involving 3 languages. He has been heavily involved in all manner of European Unix-related activities for longer than he cares to remember. He founded and still runs two successful consultancy and training companies, Penetron and Penetic, which manage to fund his well-developed tastes for global travel and exploring the native arcania. Most recently Julf established an anonymity server, anon.penet.fi, that quickly became the most popular anonymous posting service on the Internet with more than 20,000 users. Although he is based in downtown Helsinki, Julf tends to spend most of his time in airport departure lounges. Mike O'Dell, Provocateur Mike O'Dell is Vice-president of the USENIX Association and he is also Editor-in-Chief of the USENIX journal, Computing Systems. When he is not busy doing either of those two things, he is Vice-president of Engineering at UUNET Technologies, Inc., a commercial IP and UUCP connectivity provider. Mike's role in this panel, however, is to reprise his occasional role as Resident Crank and thereby provoke a lively analysis of the issues.