WAY WRONG NUMBER

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

THIS IS A TALE ABOUT HOW AN ONLINE prank grows into an international incident. It also goes a long way toward explaining the fear many non-Internet people have about this out-of-control thing called cyberspace.

Our story begins on the banks of Lake Erie, in Willowick, Ohio (pop. 15,469). It is the last Monday night in January, about 9 o'clock. City councilman Frank Suponcic is home with his wife Linda when the phone rings. Linda answers. "Hi, this is Mike," says the man at the other end, politely enough. Linda chats with Mike, figuring he must be a constituent. (As Willowick's longest-serving ward councilman, Suponcic has lots of voters calling him at home.) After a while, Mike asks for Annette. Linda tells him he has the wrong number. Mike apologizes and hangs up.

The phone rings again at 11:30 p.m. And again. And again. Wrong numbers until 4:30 a.m. A weary Suponcic wonders what's up and checks the Caller-ID logs on his phone. The first call was from British Columbia. The next was from Connecticut. There was one from Indianapolis and a few from California. Clearly these are not constituents. But who are they?

Suponcic calls the Canadian back--it is now 5:30 a.m. in that time zone, and he is only too happy to wake the dude up--and he demands to know what is going on. The guy explains, vaguely, that he was merely answering an "ad on the Internet. You know, the one about horny housewives..."

So now we have a problem. Suponcic, like a lot of people, has a new computer. But like most people, he hardly knows what the Internet is. Now, somewhere there's an ad on it. For horny housewives. With his home phone number.

That night, when the next wrong number came in, Suponcic interrogated the caller and learned that the councilman's phone number was printed at the bottom of some pictures of naked women that had been posted to a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, which, naturally, Suponcic had never heard of. But he had a friend in Cleveland who was something of a computer buff. So the next day the two of them jacked into Usenet and spent three hours sifting through about 7,400 files on alt. binaries.etc.

Eventually, they found two with Suponcic's phone number. One featured a topless brunet wearing only a string of pearls and offering phone calls for "as low as 87 [cents] per minute." The other showed a blond woman advertising "hot amateur wives ready for you from there [sic] own bed." Yikes.

Over the next week, Suponcic received more than 75 calls a day from lusty Netizens. "You just could not make phone calls," says the exasperated councilman. "And when you went to bed, you had to take your phone off the hook."

It was the sorcerer's apprentice scenario, and there was no way to stop it.

Suponcic, being a public official, knew his way around the local police department, and soon a detective started pounding the Net. By tracing the header information on the Usenet postings, the detective determined--O.K., this part is murky, we admit--that the messages had originated in Ohio, passed through Florida Online, an Internet provider in the Sunshine State, and then through anon.penet.fi a free E-mail remailer service based in Finland that allows Internet users to post messages anonymously.

The identity of the poster was, and is, unknown, though Suponcic has his suspicions. "It's my personal belief that the root of this is political," says the councilman, who had to get an unlisted telephone number and whose wife now wants to move.

On Feb. 6, at Suponcic's urging, the Willowick city council passed a resolution asking the state and federal governments to close the "loopholes" that allowed anonymous remailers to operate outside the authority of U.S. law-enforcement officials. "Once you've achieved one of these anonymous identities, you're dangerous, and there's no way law enforcement can track it," Suponcic says. "The animal's out of control."

Still not content, Suponcic contacted Steven LaTourette, the U.S. Congressman who represents his district. LaTourette's staff suspects that the problem lies with Julf Helsingius, the Finn who runs the anonymous remailer. They wrote a letter to the Finnish ambassador and sent copies to the Secretary of State and the chairman of the House Committee on International Relations. The State Department agreed last week to look into the complaint.

But here's a reality check. The Finnish remailer could not have been used, since anon.penet.fi no longer transmits binary image files. Jerry Russell, who runs Florida Online and who looked into the case, says he figures the whole thing was a relatively simple prank called a sendmail spoof, in which the prankster posts a message with a phony return address. He says the Willowick police never produced a copy of the posting for him so that he could unravel the tangle for them. Indeed, when the policeman called, "he didn't really understand what he was trying to tell me," says Russell. "The average Joe Blow police detective doesn't know flip about the Internet."

Neither does the average public official. And that, friends, is why stuff like the Communications Decency Act--the Christian Coalition's attempt to remove pornography from the Internet--sails through Congress.

--With reporting by Noah Robischon/New York

With reporting by NOAH ROBISCHON/NEW YORK