Online Anonymity: Recommendations?

[dualstow]

Every once in a while I read an article about WikiLeaks advocates and others who have their email read by the government, sometimes without their foreknowledge.

Does anyone use encryption for email? (I myself have nothing to hide  ;) )
Do you search with google or with duckduckgo?
How about the Tor software mentioned in the article linked above? (I always imagine Clive using that).

I don't use any of this stuff right now, except for the occasional duckduckgo search. Once upon a time I was going to encrypt my hard drive, but really- it's mostly brokerage statements and recipes for bolognese sauce.
Still, I'm curious. Any recommendations of software that does its job and isn't a pain to use?

[murphy_p_t]

lots of excellent freeware reviewed on this site

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-fr ... tion_Guide

[craigr]

If you use a laptop you should always encrypt the drive. Much higher chance of being stolen than a desktop.

TOR is fine, but it is slow and almost certainly some of the exit nodes (where the traffic leaves unencrypted) are likely run by some intelligence agencies. Or at least the traffic from the known nodes is being gathered down the line. There have been stories of rogue nodes in the past grabbing passwords, etc from the exits. There is nothing you can do about this but maybe layer another encryption layer onto the stream to the final destination.

Best anonymity honestly is to buy a used laptop that has been wiped clean, load it with some free software or use a USB stick or DVD to boot Linux in read-only mode (maybe incognito linux or such). Then hop on a free wireless access point and do your business. Anything less than that is going to leave a trail. Even with the above said, you probably are not really anonymous as you may think as browsing leaves many traces of you around the web.

[Gumby]

craig (or others) do you have any experience with FileVault on Mac OS X? It looks easy to turn but I must admit I've been afraid to activate it, lest something will go wrong and it will somehow corrupt my data or decrease the performance of my computer.

[craigr]

craig (or others) do you have any experience with FileVault on Mac OS X? It looks easy to turn on — and appears to be very secure — but I must admit I've been afraid to activate it, lest something will go wrong and it will somehow corrupt my data.

I use it on my laptop. Never had a problem. The latest version is much better because it encrypts the entire volume. For even more security of data you can use the free TrueCrypt to make encrypted mounted volumes inside of your OS. You can put sensitive documents, financial stuff, etc. on that volume and only mount it when you need to get to it. You can also take the encrypted image and back it up easily and it will remain encrypted.

With the above said about FileVault, I do use Time Machine at home to protect against corruption of the main FileVault protection. For portable Time Machine backup drives (USB drives), I would encrypt them also in case they are stolen.

[l82start]

i got curious about some of the products mentioned in the links above so i downloaded cyberghost to test....  speed seems good so far, no noticeable difference, my ip shows as Germany, this type of program does seem to rely on trusting them and that the vpn is true to its word about privacy. also i haven't figured out if the trial/free version runs out or loses features after a certain time period, the terms of agreement suggest they might, but i need to look into it further to be sure...

the privacychoice add-on for Firefox and betterprivasy 1.68 are two other privacy tools i am curantly playing with

adblock plus and no script (with a privacy list) are two add-ons i have been running for a long time and recommend..  they wont encrypt anything or block ip tracking but they do a good job against website tracking like Google analitics..

[craigr]

Also check out:

http://www.swissvpn.net/

It is inexpensive and gives you a Swiss IP. Not anonymous, but can be useful for bypassing firewall restrictions, etc. It will maintain your privacy from your local network outbound however. Logs will simply show your connecting to their datacenter in Switzerland. It supports PPTP which is OK but has some weaknesses, their OpenVPN will be more secure. On OSX you can download Tunnelblick to get OpenVPN support easily. OpenVPN is built into other OSs.

[Gumby]

Thanks.. I use a Time Capsule for my Time Machine backups. And I'm currently using OS X Lion. But, when Time Machine backs up a FileVault-encrypted volume, is the data on the Time Capsule encrypted?

EDIT: Nevermind. I figured it out. Seems there's an option to encrypt backups.

http://www.macworld.com/article/162999/ ... _lion.html

...and I have a bootable SSD with symbolic links to a HDD (where my large /user directory is stored), and as the article points out, this may lead to major problems since it seems that FileVault is only intended for single-volume encryption.

[dualstow]

Ah yes, TrueCrypt is what I was going to use to encrypt my hard drive way back when.
I've never used FileVault because I heard it slows down machines- well, perhaps not for everyone.

Thanks for all the replies!

[craigr]

Ah yes, TrueCrypt is what I was going to use to encrypt my hard drive way back when.
I've never used FileVault because I heard it slows down machines- well, perhaps not for everyone.

Thanks for all the replies!

FileVault I would use for general "I'm going to encrypt everything at the basic level" security. I think it is mandatory for laptops and does not affect the system performance to any degree I've noticed.

TrueCrypt is additional volume encryption for files on your computer that are extra sensitive and you want to boost security on outside of FileVault. If layered onto FileVault, it is very unlikely even a very sophisticated attacker could easily access the data.

With that said, my experience in the industry would tell me that some kind of backdoor in FileVault for US government access is always a risk. Not saying it has one, just that it's the kind of tool from a big company that would be target for such pressure.

[KevinW]

With that said, my experience in the industry would tell me that some kind of backdoor in FileVault for US government access is always a risk. Not saying it has one, just that it's the kind of tool from a big company that would be target for such pressure.

And that's the argument for using an open source encryption system. Anyone can audit the source to make sure there are no backdoors.

For the truly paranoid there's always the option of running OpenBSD with encrypted filesystems and swap. The founder actually moved to Canada so he could freely redistribute strong crypto, back when the US considered that an export-controlled munition.

Incidentally I was surprised that bin Laden's disks weren't encrypted. The argument for limiting citizens' access to crypto was always that terrorists could use it to hide secrets. Well, apparently they don't.

[MediumTex]

Incidentally I was surprised that bin Laden's disks weren't encrypted. The argument for limiting citizens' access to crypto was always that terrorists could use it to hide secrets. Well, apparently they don't.

A politician would say to never let the truth get in the way of a narrative justifying the expansion of state powers.