Finding Personal Information

There are many reasons to want online anonymity be it for the content you're looking at, private emails, purchasing goods or illegally downloading amongst many others.

I decided to look into how easy it is to gain information on other people online.

As an example, I have used a site called whois.domaintools.com, I looked how easily I could acquire information on somebody else. Once on the site, minus the www, you can search for the information linked to a certain domain, Greg's was my example to hand.

I felt the need to not post Greg's full home address although I found it within seconds. From this information posted, I could track down Greg through a variety of online resources such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps. Anyone could watch over Greg through these ways and use the information how they saw fit.

"When buying a domain, if it's unallocated – meaning that it's free to be sold by any domain registration company – it's a good idea to pick a registrar that will register it on your behalf. Their address will then appear in the domain's Whois record."

 This seems as though it would be beneficial to anyone looking to have their own website, but with privacy considered, if that was required by the owner.

"You may be tempted to get round this problem by using a false address. However, the one that appears in the Whois record is usually the one you gave when you entered your credit card details to buy the domain. Because of this, it pays to ask if you can use a PO Box number to cover your tracks.
This service currently costs £63 per year (or £51 for six months) from Royal Mail. If you only need the address to register the domain, you can let the PO Box lapse afterwards."

 Another solution would be to register a PO Box as suggested, to bypass any privacy issues.

Your Online Life, Permanent as a Tattoo

Recently I've been watching a lot of Ted Talks, on pretty much anything that seems interesting such as someone who is insanely good with a yo-yo, but this talk really got my attention.

It runs with my theme of internet anonymity, although more focused on how you build up an internet identity, teaching you that everything you do online is logged forming, as Enriquez says an 'electronic tattoo'. He goes on to suggest that we should be very wary of what is posted online as it can't be retracted, it gets added to the pool of data already present, which will be present for years.

He also references immortality in his talk and relates that to the Ancient Greeks, which I found very interesting and hadn't thought about the information in the sense it will be available forever.

The Silk Road & Bitcoin

The Silk Road has received an abundance of negativity due to it being an online marketplace where nearly anything can be bought. I found an article on the Guardian which talks to the creators of the online currency known as Bitcoin.

"Bitcoins are a currency controlled by no government, no company, and no group, but rather by maths: a series of complex cryptographic calculations rule how many Bitcoins are in existence and how many are traded."

The fact that there is no intervention from the government or another group is an obvious instant appeal to anyone performing illegal activities or someone who is very worried about their privacy.

"At the currency's birth, Bitcoins were almost worthless – five cents each. Today, a single Bitcoin trades at $70 (£46) – and the total value of all the world's Bitcoins has topped $800m (£500m). On the face of it, this makes Bitcoin the fastest-growing currency in the world."

Bitcoin is the faster-growing currency in the world due to it's structure and the way it is operated. Even the developers aren't making much money from it due to the fact, they claim, that there will be a cap on Bitcoins when there are around 2 million in circulation.

Although there is a lot of scrutiny about buying drugs online, let alone drugs in general, the Silk Road serves as a middle ground and has been described as place for 'connoisseurs'.

"Johnson said his view was that Silk Road was a site for connoisseurs: an easy way to track down better quality – not cheap – drugs. The site "isn't easy to use", but doesn't require particular expertise: "If you can set up a direct debit and follow a recipe for risotto then you'll work it out."
Once you're in, it works much like eBay: sellers' reputations are verified through feedback, building trust. Money is typically held in an escrow (a trusted middleman) until delivery, with missing packages qualifying for partial refunds.
In all, he concludes, the quality is more consistent, the sale is safer, and the experience better than trying to find a street dealer. Johnson even claims the site helps combat addiction."

 Public perception of the site is a lot different to that of the authorities. The Silk Road is built on a base of trust where the buyer can purchase what they what they want directly from the original seller, as opposed to a sketchy individual on the street. It keeps a distinct boundary of 'on a need to know basis' where the buyer and seller both remain unknown to one another, which highlights the fact that it's strictly business.

Online Anonymity

From my research so far about online activism, notably anonymous, I decided to look further into privacy issues as a direct response to my essay. The privacy issues I plan to look at are internet privacy, due to the internet being the largest weapon of free speech, many feel this is coming to an end.

"Why stay anonymous online? In today’s society there are people and automated devices that are recording your deepest, most private thoughts and activities. Each day we voluntarily divulge the most intimate details of our lives through social networking accounts, email, banking apps, online games and more. In addition, governments and corporations can censor and block our traffic based on whatever standards are in place that day."

 From a post on Activist Post which had a lot of information about how you're hacked and how to evade certain people/corporations from infringing on your privacy.

"Whether you’re browsing the Web, signing up for a new online game, or simply checking your email, you are constantly leaving tracks and giving away information to anyone with access and the knowledge to analyze the traffic. Once the data is compiled the attacker can build an incredibly accurate profile of not only your online life but your real-world life as well." 

 Any action served on the internet leaves a traceable route which the user took. This route and the data along the way are called 'traffic', anyone with hacking knowledge can access this information with the user knowing little to nothing about it. Is this a problem?

"“Why would hackers want to hack into my life? I am not that important.” You have to understand that these “intruders into our lives” are scanning huge blocks of Internet addresses at a time. They don’t care who you are. Your computer is simply another target IP address as they scan through thousands of computers and devices in their search for more information. Once collected they take all the information and funnel it into databases where they can search through it later for high-valued loot."

 The fact that huge amounts of data are collected and scanned is known nowadays by most of the generation who grew up around the rise of the internet, if they don't then that's a naive outlook.

Similarly to the way that the Government, or any other corporation, tracks people through the use of private investigators, corporations are doing the same online. Hiring hackers to analyse information required is a further breach of our human rights, but what can we do?

Keep Your Email Secret

My personal email account has over 5000 emails in my inbox, and I would have an guess as to maybe 80-90% of them would be spam and a mere 47 in my 'Junk' folder. Email addresses are frequently sold on to 3rd party companies, even when sometimes the website you're signing up for states they won't pass on personal information, who sell it on again and so forth.

When I was at school, we used to sign people's emails up for, what we considered hilarious, variety of websites.

Nowadays, I receive a lot of spam of this nature...

Now, I have no idea why these companies started pursuing me or how they got my email, but an educated guess would be that somewhere among my internet activities, I have signed up for a website/newsletter and my information has been sold on.

"Your email address is a big part of your online identity. It's also a valuable source of revenue for people whose business involves supplying spammers with live addresses.
If the sites you register with aren't secure, hackers can access the database containing all the user credentials, and the email addresses are sure to be sold on.

It's also an unpleasant fact of online life that some website owners lie when they say they'll never give your email address to anyone else. This is predominantly a problem for users of adult sites. Your email address may be sold on to sites with similar themes, which then spam you as well as selling your address on to others.

When an online business folds, the owner might also decide the list of registered users is an asset worth selling."

So how can we stop this from happening?

You could simply have a separate email for when times like this are needed, as I have, but sometimes you forget and whatnot and now I have 3 email accounts with a ridiculous amount of emails in each.

The best solution I found depends on whether or not lengthy correspondence is required with whoever it was that was requesting your email. This involves signing up for a temporary email address, such as GuerillaMail which offers a 60 minute time frame, to do such business without your email account suffering.

How Can I be Anonymous on the Internet

Amongst the guides to internet anonymity, there are guides for people who aren't so technologically experienced, promoting the use of proxy servers and the such.

This screenshot was from one such article, with the basic principles of internet anonymity.

Existing Publications on Anonymity

There are an abundance of books available and internet guides to being anonymous on the web, but the problem is how effectively the information is delivered to the reader. The books available look very formal in some instances and on the opposite end of the scale they just look unworthy to be read.

Internet guides seem to have adhered to a simple approach to teaching the reader, but sometimes they are dull and boring, hard to understand and lengthy.

I understand, through my research, that even people reading about becoming anonymous online are worried of being tracked reading such articles. This can be avoided by reading my publication and using the tools that come with it to access anonymity minimizing and connection to the end user and the product, some of which have to be downloaded.

My aim, unlike some of the other published articles, is to provide free information to the reader. Required programs will be supplied via memory stick and a short publication to outline anonymity and how to go about acquiring said status.

I need to compile what the key elements to anonymity online are and put them in a manageable manor to communicate clearly to the reader.

How to be Anonymous Online

Through my research I have stumbled upon many 'How to be Anonymous Online, 'How to Stay as Anonymous as Possible' and other such articles which explain ways of how to stay anonymous.

Many of the articles point to using a certain program called Tor, which is an anonymity network. Tor is an acronym for 'The Onion Router' the name, well specific use of 'onion', depicts the layers of encryption used within the network.

"Tor aims to conceal its users' identities and their network activity from surveillance and traffic analysis by separating identification and routing. It is an implementation of onion routing, which encrypts and then randomly bounces communications through a network of relays run by volunteers around the globe. These onion routers employ encryption in a multi-layered manner (hence the onion metaphor) to ensure perfect forward secrecy between relays, thereby providing users with anonymity in network location. That anonymity extends to the hosting of censorship-resistant content via Tor's anonymous hidden service feature.^[8] Furthermore, by keeping some of the entry relays (bridge relays) secret, users can evade Internet censorship that relies upon blocking public Tor relays.^[18]
Because the internet address of the sender and the recipient are not both in cleartext at any hop along the way, anyone eavesdropping at any point along the communication channel cannot directly identify both ends. Furthermore, to the recipient it appears that the last Tor node (the exit node) is the originator of the communication rather than the sender."

 As stated, Tor is a tool to conceal identity across the internet, and is mandatory in connection to the Darknet and the Silk Road.

So what exactly is the Darknet?

"Well, the Darknet is pretty much an anonymous Internet where you can browse the Internet and not be traced. The Darknet is often referred to as the ‘Deep Web’ and ‘Hidden Internet’, it doesn’t operate the way your used to. The address you use on the anonymous internet isn’t the same as the ‘surface’ web, for example: Typing “Google.co.uk” into your web browser will take you to Google’s British search engine, however, for a search engine on the Darknet such as TORCH Search Engine, you cannot type in “TORCH.co.uk” because the website is hidden from view. In order to go to TORCH you would have to know the URL, the URL for TORCH is “xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion”."

Provided by theanonymousinternet.tumblr

So the Darknet is another internet which is lesser known and linked with a lot of illegal activity, but boasts anonymity, whilst staying pretty design basic.

This image is a screenshot from the Silk Road and a lovely store called 'Arms Depot' featuring assault rifles for sale at Christmas special prices "Get a fucking submachine gun for Christmas!' is a particularly gripping sentence.

So with the benefit of privacy the Darknet has accumulated a large user base, with the Silk Road being a prominent feature in this, it has created a platform for a whole host of different activities. This is similar to what happened with 4chan, a lot of good has come from the internet community within /b/, the random image board dubbed 'the internets arsehole'. /b/ is the home to probably some of the best hackers known to the world, fighting for what they believe to be 'the greater good', and causing a bit of chaos at the same time.

The chaos side of /b/ and the Silk Road both draw a lot of negative attention from the media and the positive contributions made on either are overlooked.

In summary, the Darknet could prove to be a very useful tool. Advert free, complete freedom of speech through anonymity and an untraceable connection are all very appealing.