Anonymity is available for most Internet users today.
In our increasingly digital society, that raises a variety of questions. Recently, police in Helsinki struck at the heart of Internet anonymity, seizing electronic records from a computer specifically designed to mask the identity of people sending electronic mail and moving files through the global network. Acting on the request of California police and the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology, Finnish police forced a private computer consultant to hand over information they said might identify an Internet user who allegedly stole files from the church's computer last month. Sophisticated computer users are skeptical, generally believing that clever users can find ways to hide their identity. That doesn't seem so criminal.