On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 10:18:53AM -0500, Kevin S. Van Horn wrote:
barabbus@hushmail.com wrote:
[If you're not making a serious attempt at limiting access to information about your on-line activities you're pissing into the wind.]
Do you know of any effective means of concealing one's web-surfing habits? I know there are things like Anonymizer.com, but with all of these you have to trust the service providers. I've looked into JAP, but they don't have a real network -- just one path between two links, both controlled by the same people.
To get a good answer, you should refine the question to include details about your threat model, e.g. : "I don't want my spouse to look at the history file in Internet Explorer and see that I was shopping for their birthday present online." or "I don't want my employer to look at their proxy logs and figure out that I'm looking for a new job in a different state." or "I don't want John Ashcroft to figure out that I'm a pot-smoking Al Qaida member who's ordering a case of boxcutters from officemax.com." (which is functionally indistinguishable from "I don't want John Ashcroft to figure out that I'm a free-thinking ACLU member who's ordering an unlicensed printing press from officemax.ru.") If your life really is so dramatic and exciting that your realistic threat model is the third choice, you're fucked. You're in never-lose-sight-of-your laptop trust-nobody the-walls-have-ears X-files land. A web proxy is not going to save you from a police state. Tricky probability hacks like letting other people connect to your 802.11 hotspot are only "reasonable doubt" in a hypothetical perfect fair courtroom with a jury full of engineers and statisticians. It's really hard to get your trial assigned to one of those hypothetical perfect fair courtrooms with fully rational juries - you're much more likely to get assigned to one of the standard ones, with juries full of people whose best grasp of probability tells them it's best to fill out Lotto tickets with the dates of their kids' birthdays because that's lucky. Torturers and despots don't want to hear about "plausible deniability" - ask John Walker Lindh about that. ("No, really, I was just studying radical Islam .. ") The best use of surveillance data may not be trial evidence - it's intelligence, which is used to lead to arrests and the subsequent seizure of admissible evidence. A web proxy (like Anonymizer, or one of John Kozubik's virtual colo boxes) will save you from prying spouses and employers, which are more realistic threats for most of the world's population; they're also enough to make it really expensive to spy on you, which means that you're unlikely to be the target of opportunistic or systematic surveillance. They're not nearly enough to save you if you're really in hot water with The Man; which you almost certainly aren't, so count your blessings and keep your head down. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@parrhesia.com