https://theprivacyblog.com/blog/anonymity/why-tor-failed-to-...
People he spoke to, witnesses they could....encourage....
The author of this article is also very wrong: Anonymity is not on a spectrum. It’s all or nothing. Like a Mario game where any mistaken encounter makes you start over (and that’s if you don’t get in trouble for what you did).
First step is to understand that any system could be bugged. Every IRL confidant could sell you out. Every keyboard could have a keylogger, etc. Every store could have a security camera. Phones are giving out their MAC numbers to every cell tower and wifi radio. They now have chips you can’t turn off, and so forth.
You should also assume there is no such thing as an “anonymous” account and that every service COULD sell out whatever information you gave it. (Yes, even Telegram or ProtonMail, however unlikely that may be.)
The below is a playbook for how to become truly anonymous. Continue to live your everyday life but the below is only for your “anonymous” identities, which you can gradually bootstrap as a hobby:
The first thing you do, therefore, is bootstrap your identity by taking advantage of unlinkability that is available to you. Buy a bunch of Android phones on Craigslist for cash, for example. (Or pay a homeless guy to buy a phone in a store for you.) Do not use SIM cards at all, only WiFi. Never take photos, etc. Keep your phone off or in a faraday cage until you use it. For extra points, always use it through a VPN on WiFi at home, which you purchased using the accounts below:
Then make an anonymous google account on the Android phone. Make some ProtonMail accoung usinf such an anonymous Google account. Now you can bootstrap from email addresses.
Buy some Google Play gift cards and download some apps to get a second number. Now you can bootstrap from a phone number. Sign up to Telegram, Signal and other accounts using this. Now you have end to end encrypted messaging.
Frankly, though, realtime messaging is a bit of a luxury to continue to stay in normie world. To stay truly anonymous, you should continue to:
1. Schedule posts and mail send/receive at random times. Do not ever use realtime audio or video because it might be recorded. You might make an exception for early days of your projects when people would have no reason to go out of their way to record you — just to give them confidence you’re a real person. But afterwarss, stop doing that. Let the people build your movement for you.
2. Never mention your anonymous identity or projects from your real one, and vice versa. This means your anonymous identity MUST NEVER have confidants or colleagues IRL. Build up a network of colleagues who are “fronts” for what you do. Eventually you can step back and let the movement do things for you.
3. Pay and get paid in cryptocurrency. Have smart contracts send you the money (think Richard Heart’s Hex origin address, but actually anonymous).
4. You will only ever be able to spend the crypto on paying people for services and DeFi protocols. You can never cash out to fiat, because the IRL purchases catch up with you when they follow the money. There is a surprising amount of online services you can spend $97 million dollars on, while staying anonymous ;-) If you really do need to spend money IRL (because you went broke somehow in your everyday life) then you can cashout using cross-chain bridges and Monero to pay for goods. But still, never get ostentatious wealth IRL!
5. The weakest link then becomes your writing or coding style. Never publish any code or writing, let others do it for you. Make your communication to others from your anonymous identity sufficiently different than anything saved later would not identify you (this is the weakest link, but you can consider “playing a character” when speaking to others).
6. Any private keys that you used to sign your messages can be periodically published in some conspicuous place, effectively giving you plausible deniability about all your previous and future posts. It’s hard to prove a negative (that no one else has access to your private keys before your public disclosure.)
Alright, Hacker News. I have given away the non-amateur anonymity playbook using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
Go ahead and try to deanonymize this in the comments below. Assume you are a state actor with all tools at your disposal.
Is it not, for the non-criminal user? My HN, Reddit and Twitter accounts are "anonymous" (pseudonymous would be more accurate), and it matters to me to the extent I share thoughts I would not on Facebook or if Googling my name lead straight to it - not that I'm ashamed of them, I try to be decent (tho I slip at times and am more brash than I would IRL), it's just that they hold some personal opinions and matters, kind of like that lady in OP's post (except I wouldn't reuse pseudonyms, especially not openly cross-linked to identified accounts). Obviously, a governmental agency that had any reason to look for me would link them in the blink of an eye, but it is "anonymous" enough for my needs: people who matter to me or people like prospective employers do not know of them and hardly could. Even if they leaked to some dark corners of the Internet like my SSN (screw you, Equifax), that hardly doxes me as far as regular humans are concerned. If someone emailed me with my online usernames, it would creep the fuck out of me, but ultimately be inconsequential, at worse it would threaten to shame me for my opinions.
So how's that not on a spectrum of anonymity? OP's post obviously does not say your anonymity when it comes to three letter US agencies is on a spectrum, that is black and white and s-he recognizes it, but rather the link-ability of your online presence(s) to your real life identity. With that Tinder lady at the "IDGAF"-end of it, your paranoid (or criminal) Jane Doe on the other end and me somewhere in between (but much closer to the former).
Per Wikipedia:
>Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. [...] The important idea here is that a person be non-identifiable, unreachable, or untrackable.
Using a phone is probably the first mistake. If you are going to use your home network you are better off using a machine you control and an operating system that is open source.
I suggest these steps: Step 1: Connect to a popular vpn. Step 2: Connect to tor Step 3: Get free vps or pay with cryto you trade for gift cards purchased or some other method Step 4: Connect to vps with desktop running. Use virtual desktop. Step 5: Use vpn. This time use vpn with best rep to be accepted as regular traffic. Step 6: Signup for services
Step 1 solves the k issue. Many people using that vpn will connect to tor
Step 4: Seems slow but at the virtual desktop level out things are fast from that machine to new hosts. Use scripts could help.
They still had to somehow link your online identity to your phone. And how would they do that? The phone is simply a computer that you use, through VPNs, to send and reveive mail and post messages to groups etc. They’d have to approach ProtonMail, then your VPNs in order, and then get security footage from the place where you were accessing the VPN at that time. And then cross-reference your gait etc. to a database. Maybe in 10 years they would have such coordination, and we will need better tactics.
What’s far more interesting is what to do if VPNs are banned in a country. You can’t be using one there. You’d have to have set up anonymous hosting and port forward stuff yourself.
Again, it’s possible that all anonymous hosting, VPN etc. is shut down and requires KYC by say 2050. That is why you must bootstrap from what are valid but essentially “compromised* accounts now while you still can, and hope they are grandfathered into the new totalitarian surveillance system. Buying phones on craigslist is one example.
Another example is those eyes Anderton installs in Minority Report, but security in that movie is like a bad joke, IRL he’d be outed instantly by his gait, heart patterns via wifi and so on. In fact they didnt even change the access keys after he ran LMAO
It seems that this would work for a while, but if we're trying to bootstrap well into the future, a shiny new phone of the hour Samsung S22 showing up new on the network only 15 years out in 2037 would stick out like a beacon, and that's assuming it would even connect to the then-current comms protocols.
This is nontrivial
but you can't find the "Don't automatically connect to this network" flag that stops a device from doing what you described?
Don't tell people what is and isn't possible unless you're sure.
Your opinion is purely speculation, and only true for people of your skillset.
It would hopefully keep the sentiment while changing the words.
The hardest investigation to defend against is the rubber hose investigation. Gotta give them what they want, without them even suspecting you could be that mysterious founder. The only way people suspect you’re someone is if your k is small, eg how many people could be Satoshi?
If you’re efficient, you can retire the mysterious founder identity and simply have multiple “early adopter” addresses that generated rewards early, among actual adopters. Make an exit from your projects as early as you can after they gain momentum with the wider crowd.
There is no way to stop people from starting open source projects, accruing the early rewards and then selling those rewards to others in a decentralized exchange or async OTC deal. If every country worldwide ever closes down all such anonymous mechanisms (maybe by 2050) and makes register in order to sell your rewards, you simply sell your private keys to the wallet in an async OTC deal. The buyer will have to trust that you won’t move the money after they register the address and before they move it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJccK4lV74
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SYZqC7EGMfM
To not share how you secure anonymity is to rely on security by obscurity. Now I think it’s better to lay out the playbook using Kerchkoff’s principle so k will become far larger than 150. Remember… to improve anonymity, at some point you have to publish your private keys. And where better than Hacker News?
The playbook is yours. Improve it!
Step 1: try to break it. Post how you’d defeat the anonymization scheme. The threat model is that you’re all state level actors combined. I’d love to see what you come up with.
Nice try, Feds! :P
My first question about this plan is "what are you getting paid for and how do you advertise your services"? You need to never meet the people paying you in person, and ideally you are selling some purely digital good. So, something like underground illegal programming or hacking or such? Is there anything else that would work?
No, you don’t do work for money. You start an open source project and get many people to run your software. You meanwhile generate as many early rewards as you can (you can even do it under multiple accounts) and when the ecosystem is up and running, you’ll be the mysterious founder, generating millions (or billions) in passive income.
Sounds familiar? It should…
Simply never move money using your first few accounts, and whoever early people you pay, have them stake your currency for a long time, and borrow against it on decentralized lending marketplaces, to avoid spooking people that the mysterious founder has moved their money.
That's one of the problems with trying to stay anonymous, right? The playbook constantly goes out of date.
Living in no-extradition countries, using GrapheneOS on an Android phone, using Jabber/OTR chat for communication.
It’s a modular system. The key is Kerchkoff’s principle — I can describe it to you all day long, but as long as I don’t reveal each identity from the other, you all won’t know what projects I am doing, even if they earned $97 million already.
The timing could have been conincedental. Even if he was the only person online on campus at the time, it proves nothing.
South America is the greatest tumbler of all. I spent years in Argentina under the currency restrictions and paid my rent in Bitcoin, bought USD and pesos at black market rates in Bitcoin, all with people I met on localbitcoins and never using an exchange. I don't know about Brazil, but there is a huge market for peer to peer BTC in AR and UY, and you can just trade an envelope of cash over the table at a Starbucks in Buenos Aires for anywhere up to $10K USD.
In the USA I would be scared of being on camera, but I really doubt you would have that problem if you meet someone in a bar or on the beach in Brazil.
[edit] Just to explain this comment for people who think of BTC as something that you have to buy or sell on an exchange where you're allowing the endpoints to be tracked; the original reason for cryptocurrency was that you don't have to show your passport or link it to a bank account. That still obtains in lots of places in the world where people will happily give you their shitty paper money for bitcoin, and you can use the paper to pay your rent. Don't buy BTC on an exchange, and don't sell it on an exchange. Buy it from someone in person in a phone-to-phone transfer, or win it in a poker game. Keep it in a private wallet, not an exchange. Sell it P2P in person when you want to. You don't need to use an exchange at all.
For example, you buy a burner phone, but the place you bought it from, even if a second hand shop, had a security camera. Maybe they also record IMEI's before selling phones.
Or you carry your burner phone together with your real phone. Or alternatively, you leave one at home when using the other. Both of these things can be linked by a sufficiently determined actor (FBI/NSA level).
Or they track you to using a public square WiFi one day. Again, cameras are everywhere.
If they got your real name, no matter how, it's game over. You will be surveilled and they will find proof to link you. This is why all those posts "if only DPR used this kind of encryption or dead-men-switch" are ridiculous. Once they knew his real name it was just a matter of time and building a case.
The surveillance state is already here. The dragnet is on for everyone, and if they miss anything it's because it's hidden in the noise, not that the signal isn't being sent.
We're cooked, it's over. Forget being anonymous.
I.e. cash, rural, paper letters for last mile
The internet is by definition centralized and the government has privileged access, from a surveillance perspective. Luckily, the number of people who really need this level of anonymity (i.e. I am wanted by every world government as a top priority) is pretty low.
I think this is the only way to feel truly at ease with the state of things, really. Keeping a whole self in public or in private is asking a bit much.
You have layers and layers of technology in even the simplest modern computers, and core network infrastructure subject to tapping or worse.
And much of this that can be done from anywhere on the planet.
Analog requires physical proximity, a strength and a serious inconvenience. But it also has the property of being legacy, in that you are now immune to state of the art digital methods, and susceptible to older ones that may be out of institutional memory and practice.
**SPOILERS** Once the US that's basically our world discovers the existence of "world walkers" when they nuke the Whitehouse, it quickly steps into an authoritarian surveillance hellstate capable of realtime surveiling the population around the country to the point where they can track people entering their timeline because they were on camera exiting a building they were never recorded entering, or were flagged buying a plane/bus ticket from a city they shouldn't have been in according to previous records, or in one case for leaving a coffee shop with a noticeably empty backpack when she'd entered the shop with it completely full, having passed the contents to a world walker she was meeting. That irregularity automatically flagged everyone entering/leaving that building for review in their system and they backtracked all of these people through their paths that day until finding the gap where he'd stepped through to their world. That all happened in a matter of minutes and then quickly homed in on him.
Anyhow,it goes into detail about the lengths they go to to avoid detection by these systems and honestly didn't strike me at as all farfetched. The technology and capacity exists and it's a concentrated effort on part of the government is all it would take to implement it.
I get 93.22% for defendants in US District Court in 2019. And 93.16% for 2018. (Edit: Fixed some math & dates)
Edit: Found the referring agency line item. 91.12% for FBI-referred in 2019, 91.34% in 2018.
If you're going to quote statistics, don't just pull them out of thin air. The government is required to report this stuff, you know?
Like "being super careful isn't enough" _might be true_, but if you did everything on this list and get caught anyways, you are in a super minority of people getting caught.
The example in the article (a hotmail-based email address being used). Everyone sees this and immediately goes "OK the feds can get this info". If such a basic opsec failure was happening, how is it that this person was still able to get as far as they did building up their website?
Being worried about the feds finding you from speech analysis of your posts online seems a bit silly when it's always _not_ that and much more just "finding the one simple thing you did wrong".
Sure, if u piss off the wrong agent and they spend a few years on the case you may get busted. But the vast majority?
Tor is the definition of deceptively simple, and there are a lot of impressionable people who read articles like this on the web when they’re first starting out who could easily be lulled into a false sense of security and then start transacting on the darknet and think they can’t be touched. OGs on HN know better and remember the threads where tptacek and cperciva would routinely dismantle this notion of tor or VPN anonymity/security.
Whonix uses Kloak to mitigate this [1], but unfortunately it isn't available in Qubes-Whonix.
> Mixers and tumblers will eventually leak
Don't use mixers and tumblers, use Monero and/or Monero atomic swaps.
But, you are right that it is futile to maintain defense against a determined 3 letter agency.
[1]: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Keystroke_Deanonymization#Kloak
I'm about to publish an update to it that uses a toolbar popup to fill out forms instead of the current lag approach, which will also protect against keyboard layout leaks[1] (which Tor browser/privacy.resistFingerprinting protects against anyway)
Monero doesn’t make your transactions anonymous, it makes them ambiguous. your wallet might default to using an n=6 ring signature, meaning it picks 5 random addresses with balances and creates a transaction that could have plausibly originated from any of those 5 or your own. so you get plausible deniability, but also if your threat actor can unmask the other 5 addresses (which might not be so hard if those accounts are regularly interacting with exchanges) then you’re done.
zcash gets you actual transaction-level anonymity, not just ambiguity. fewer places accept it, but in theory you can still break the link by obtaining zcash and then exchanging it for the currency of your choice on any exchange that doesn’t ask for PII (e.g. a DEX)
Yes, working from home is very suspicious. :P
(That said, the VPN companies that work in the B2C segment for those who can't set up their own VPN server is small and they're all well-known to the government.)
Getting to 99.99999% reliability is very difficult for one person, it usually takes a highly diligent team with very well-sorted processes.
Privacy is never a guaranteed thing when you introduce ubiquitous computing to the mix, even things outside of computers can profile you like being captured in CCTV around the time when your signals are picked up from a computer/smartphone phoning home or unusual internet activity, like the scene out of Mr. Robot.
We need to be exchanging personal data only in forms that become worthless and unidentifying in a short period of time, requiring secure refreshes to maintain.
- if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could easily flag you to your government. If you use wifi at a common point you're likely to be flagged and there isn't an easy way other than keeping on the move. But moving often is another anomalous event, and it's very difficult to do even for Drug Lords ( El Chapo ) or Terrorists that it behooves to do. This puts you in a sort of Zugzwang, to borrow a chess term.
- there's always leakage, for instance, in the way you talk with people in the real world. At some point you send enough communication for sophisticated frequency analysis.
- and there are other patterns of usage that could be used to identify you, like searches or even keyboard frequency on anonymized accounts can be de-anonymized by very specific markers ( ML works! ).
- off ramps for crypto aren't very good. If you're in e.g. Brazil, haha, yeah, good luck spending bitcoin or any other crypto and going unnoticed. Mixers and tumblers will eventually leak and you'll be caught.
- you're very vulnerable to social engineering by people you do business with. one slip where you stop communicating in a transactional mode of communication and that's a weak link in your armor.
In the end, the FBI only has to be right once, and you have to be right every time.