how to stay anonymous

This is a work in progress on aa "anarchowikibook" on anonymity. (please help if you can)

See also: anonymity | privacy

On Internet

Current Internet standards are intended to identify the person posting some information or recieving it over the global and local network several techniques can be used to stop this.

Open proxies

Probably the simpliest way is to set up a proxy. The job of a proxy server is to receive and send information on behalf of the client. This way it always looks as if it is the proxy server requesting the information.

To explain this simplier, it would be like a person asking a friend to go to pick up some package and to mail some letters. This, however, as can easily be seen opens the innocent person to persecution by the oppressive regimes.

In addition to the mentioned above problem, if the communication between the client and the proxy is known about, it can be listened to and thus compromising client's anonymity.

Some websites allow you (for a fee) to use them as an open proxy... this can be dangerous, since your information is known to them, and under most jurisdictions, your information will be given to the law enforcement agents if requested.

TOR Onion Routing

TOR Onion Routing (tor) is the technology designed by Electronic Frontiers Foundation, which takes open proxy technique one step further. It chains them, so that the communication between the client and server are not only from clients, but also from other servers.

It would be like somebody asking a friend to mail the package, but instead of mailing it, the friend asked one's own friend, and then the request would be passed on, until somebody decides that it's just easier for them to actually post the package, and it gets posted. This, however, still has the problem that if the communications are being intercepted at the client's end, one cannot deny that the package originated from one's computer, unless one is registered as the tor server.

Distributed p2p datastore

Today this is the most anonymous means of communicating. It takes the relay system one step forward, but introducing peer-to-peer element to it. Thus everybody is becoming a server as well as the client.

Imagine if a person wanted to mail a package, and would ask a friend and a friend would pass this package on. But in order you to join the system, one would promise to mail packages for others. This might seem like a bad idea at first, however, it gives a person plausible deniability, since if one is getting interrogated by cops it is always possible to say that you had no idea what was in the package, because somebody just passed it on, with no right to decline. It can also be claimed that the use of this facility was for educational purposes only, to store large files online without having to pay the fee to large corporations, or for any other legitimate reason.

In addition to this these systems also introduce a datastore to themselves, which means that sites, files, and all the information is spread out amongst the "nodes" which makes it harder to determine who is actually hosting the information. As can easily be noticed, in all the previous systems no concern was made about that (the person the package was mailed to, was well known).

As of 2005, some of the most known implementations of this network model, (Freenet, Entropy), suffer scalability problems that would prevent these networks to approach sizes comparable to that of the Internet. This is due to a technical limitation inherent to the fact that searching for a random file or its parts scattered in the network is an operation which takes an amount of time proportional to the size of the network itself (linear time complexity), in the typical case where every node runs, on average, one search operation. Other distributed file system models effectively overcome this limitation.

List of networks

• Entropy
• Freenet
• I2P
• Tor

Friend-to-Friend network

The consept of friend to friend network is being introduced right now in the forthcoming version (0.7) of freenet. The idea is to add the possibility of a "closed" friendship networks, to ensure anonymity. The concept is also called a darknet (hidden network within the network).

The main difference from the other p2p networks is that you only connect to nodes that you "trust", hopefully the network will be established so that even though Alice doesn't know Frank, the information Frank wants to be made public can be accessed by Alice if:

• Alice knows Bob
• Bob knows Claire
• Claire knows Dave
• Dave knows Ewon
• Ewon knows Frank

External links

• The Onion Relay
• Internet Security Tutorial on BoyWiki