What freeware can be used to protect my privacy (keeping Petraeus in mind)

What you provide to an ISP is a common datastream. How that datastream is interpreted, to say if refined into an encrypted medium, is not what ISPs proffer as publicly acceptable or normal. Perhaps, quite to the contrary, within foreseeable means auguring what outside interests advance as change, ostensibly then to qualify what privacy constitutes to the individual, by rendering what normally accessible data is encrypted to a service of illegibility;- or so by proximity only, being within a greater omnibus of governance from bylaws, even they cannot but best allude, when truly to defray and accede to your insular temperance.

I don't believe the greater proposed "Pink Slips" ISPs will be sharing with their populace are charged with an onus of intended means whilst a provision of content can be ascertained as established.

Given that web & torrent traffic are the most critical, here's a summary of what this article says: Free Ways to Hide an IP Address

The author says these free proxy servers work for web traffic: hidenumbers.info whiteherb.info simplesurfer.info

And, the article implies these free VPN servers might work with torrent traffic: packetix.net/en torvpn.com/information.html cyberghostvpn.com

I'm not sure what the (effective) difference is between the free proxy servers & the free VPN servers - but it seems the VPN servers have a better chance of providing privacy for both the Torrent and Web traffic.

So, I'll start checking out freeware VPN providers who handle both torrent and web traffic. If you have steering advice, it would be helpful because this seems to be an open-ended research project at the moment ... and getting wider.

The email your recipients receive via gmail web does not contain your IP address. However, the gmail server logs do, which would be subject to subpoena if there were a legal indication for that.

When you want to hide your IP, it is important to figure out who you are trying to hide it from and who is the adversary.

If you are trying to hide the IP because you are going to do a crime, it is a different situation in terms of the adversary than if you simply want to hide your IP from your correspondents.

This is the same situation. There are many news servers which don't post your IP, so it wouldn't be discovered by other news correspondents, but the IP would be accessible to subpoena of the news provider's logs.

I agree with the question 'who are you trying to hide it from?'

I think the hard part is to find a freeware bittorrent privacy engine for obtaining old movies that are not on NetFlix.

What I found (so far) were the following decidedly non-free bittorrent IP-address hiding privacy solutions: $6/month

$28/year $5/month $10/month

However, upon closer inspection of the above BitTorrent privacy solutions, only BTGuard works on all platforms:

does not work with Linux is Windows only also is Windows only

So, the quest is for a freeware BitTorrent privacy solution which works similarly to BTGuard on Linux.

We all agree.

Hiding from a crime is NOT what we're asking about here. What we're looking for is simply a modicum of reasonable privacy given whom we're trying to protect ourselves against (which Petraeus should have known since he was the head of the super-secret spy organization).

Whom we'd want to hide from are: a) BiTTorrent (hide from the throttling ISP & from the MPAA) b) Web (hide from data gathering sites & from prying neighbors) c) Usenet (hide from whacko people who also want to kill you) d) Email (hide from irate husbands who want to kill you)

Of the set above, Email is the easiest to protect yourself against using freeware (as Gmail does not put your IP address in the header).

USENET isn't too bad either, as freeware public USENET nntp servers at least obfuscate the IP address.

For the web, it appears that the freeware proxy solutions should work, such as Privoxy & Tor, to hide your originating IP address. Also the freeware VPN solutions 'should' work (but they seem complicated to set up).

The hardest one to find freeware protection for appears to be the BitTorrent clients, on Linux. The only client I've found so far is BTGuard, which is not freeware.

I'm confused about the freeware privoxy/tor & openVPN solutions. Do you think the privoxy/tor and/or openVPN solutions will also work for a BitTorrent client?

Yes, but freeware should be used when it can easily be used.

For the four things we'd wish to keep private, it seems that there is available freeware for three of the four.

1. Email (gmail freeware hides your IP address from the recipient)
2. Usenet (free public nntp servers obfuscate your IP address)
3. Web (I think privoxy/tor/vpn freeware 'might' work for the web)
4. BitTorrent (so far I can only find payware for torrent privacy)

Googling, it seems the privoxy/tor solutions won't work for bittorrent downloads - but I'm not yet sure about VPN.

Q: Do you know of a freeware privacy solution for bittorrents?

It makes sense that the honeypots might actually be the danger.

That's why it's probably a good idea to ensure that the source code of any freeware be freely available.

At the moment, I think there are three fundamental freeware solutions that 'can' be trusted:

1. OpenVPN (might work for bittorrent also)
2. TOR (should work for web traffic)
3. Privoxy (should work for web traffic)

I'm reading the respective FAQs as we speak:

1. VPN -> openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html
2. TOR ->
   formatting link
   Proxy ->
   formatting link
   At this early moment in my weekend research, it seems that the freeware VPN solutions are more powerful than the freeware proxy solutions for the stated four needs:

a) BitTorrent (I don't know of VPN provides anonymity here) b) USENET (I'm not sure if VPN helps here either) c) Web browsing (I think VPN works for web browsing) d) Gmail IP address (I think VPN might work for the login IP)

So far, nobody yet has outlined how these freeware privacy solutions might help us - so if you have actual experience with any of these privacy solutions, please advise.

Thanks!

I just ran that snooping website from Tor. It got my location quite wrong of course, but it also detected I was on tor.

But running that snooper from my normal browser didn't seem particularly interesting. Any website can see your browser capabilities.

Business grade DSL site don't inspect your bit torrent, play shapping games, etc. Not that I suggest you spend the extra money for business grade DSL. Rather just avoid the obvious ISP players like Commiecast or Time Warner.

ehow has a reputation for being link bait. That is, the articles are not really written by experts. The intent is to serve advertisements.

All Petraeus and the woman had to do was buy two blackberries and simply use handset to handset email. The crypto is unbreakable, though law enforcement can easily track the recipients of the messages.

Or use encrypted email (as I do for virtual business communications).

Enigmail plugin is easier to use. For some long forgotten reason, me and my accomplises use GPG4win and Kleopatra.

If you're technically limited and just want to pass encrypted files around (as attachments), try Truecrypt:

Somehow, I always thought that the CIA was the poster child for secure communications. I guess not.

Hi Mom! :)

So far nobody has made any useful suggestions for freeware that enhances privacy on the net.

It's a valid question asking for freeware privacy applications.

If folks don't have a clue about the answer - that's OK - but why clutter up the thread with all these non answers?

So far, based on my continuous googling over the past few hours, the answer for 'adding' to our net privacy seems to be along the lines of:

a) VPN freeware (such as openvpn) b) Proxy freeware (such as privoxy & polipo & tor & vidalia) c) Bittorrent freeware (unknown as yet if freeware exists)

I ask those who comment to state which of the freeware privacy programs 'they' are using - so that we can learn from the voice of real experience.

Well, that would be a fine start! :)

It looks like these are the main freeware privacy options, as I continue to research the topic to organize my thoughts:

1. VPN (such as openVPN)
2. Privoxy/Polipo services (web proxy & cache management)
3. Tor Browser Bundle (easy to use pre-configured Firefox anonymizer)
4. Tor/Vidalia (anonymizer services)
5. Torsocks/socat (can be used to torify applications)

The good news is that we can apparently "torify" applications according to this tor web site:

it says verbatim: "To Torify applications that support SOCKS proxies, just point them at Tor's SOCKS port (127.0.0.1 port 9050). For applications that support neither SOCKS nor HTTP, take a look at torsocks or socat."

The good news in those cryptic hints are that we can possibly "torify" the NNTP and bittorrent connections (so maybe we won't need the VPN after all?) as longs as the nntp client (40Tude Dialog) and the bittorrent client (Deluge) are Socks5 compliant.

So I'll read up on this to find out if it is indeed possible to torify both the nntp and the bittorrent connections:

I'm naive. As far as I understood things, wherever you initially connect to in order to get onto the internet has to know your current, actual IP address in order to send and receive the electronic communications you engage in - email, files, whatever.

THEREFORE, you never have true anonymity in so much as there is one entity that will know your actual IP address. At best you could try to ascertain that the entity you use to hook into the Internet does not keep logs of those who use their servers beyond the time required for you to complete your session, but that seems to ultimately depend upon trust that the third party does what it says it does wrt logs. And of course there's no guarantee that it's not a honey pot as alluded to by an earlier poster.

So even though I find the conversation interesting, it seems as though you have two desires - one is to hide your IP address absolutely and another is to maintain the privacy of your communications. Your research suggests that you can achieve the second one with the caveat mentioned earlier that "what works today may not work tomorrow" (whether due to breaking things elsewhere, technological advances, human error, malware, ... fill in the blank).

On the other hand, I've read nothing and seen nothing that indicates you can achieve the first desire. So in that sense you may ultimately be chasing a red herring. Sorry, but the entire thread simply reminds me of the mantra "you can run but you can't hide." I suppose you could mooch someone else's wi-fi connection or slave someone else's machine to let them be your fall guy.

PGP is a bit of work. Blackberries are no brainers. You can even instant message (BBM) with crypto.

You can also use a PGP plugin for email on a blackberry if you need to deal with less secure platforms.

Here is the intel on intel. The CIA is a bunch of frat boys. The FBI is a bunch of excops. The NSA is a geek fest.

Once the recon work went to the NGO and ELINT went to the NSA, the CIA ended up a dirty tricks outfit. It should have been shut down years ago. Some people call it the Criminally Inept Agency. For instance, when the CIA was working South America to defeat the commies, they needed covert airfields. Hey, why not get in bed with the drug cartels. What harm could that do. Doh!

The CIA grew out of the OSI. They were interested in snooping around Europe, so they needed "world travelers" to fill out their ranks. That is where the frat boys come in. They recruited rich kids out of Harvard and Yale that "summered" in Europe. It hasn't changed much over the years.

Now the CIA is a freakin' second military with no accountability, launching Hellfires based on dubious intel. Worlds worst business card: Number 3 in Al Qaeda.

Few people know the CIA paid for the big dish out by Stanford. It was used to snoop on Soviet radar via moonbounce. Again, that was back in the ELINT days.

Regarding using public computers to get around snooping, the USAF makes a version of linux just for that purpose. You can use hook up a smartcard reader. I set it up for yucks. The problem though you need to be able to boot the PC, which isn't easy in most places.

Tor. I use it to prevent google and hotmail from seeing my IP address when I create cut out accounts.

I don't trust google and barely trust Microsoft. They both are compromised since they have government contracts. God damn google insists you have a damn gmail account to use Android.

Sure, but PGP/GPG/whatever is portable and works anywhere. Doing all your email on a Blackberry is impossible. I'm constantly getting huge files and bizarre attachments that need encryption. For example, I couldn't easily display ACAD drawings on a Blackberry. Instead of encrypting the data stream, I just encrypt the payload and not have my encryption tied to a specific device of application.

Cute summary and probably accurate. The standard joke is that the way you can recognize a CIA operation is that everyone dies, except the intended victim.

I know one of the engineers that built the dish. Knowing his background, I'm not surprised.

Atmospheric research was a code words for spying.

I've been using LPS for years. I have it on both a CD and flash drive using the JAVA encryption tool thing and an X.509 formatted certificate. I also use it on my XP desktop:

While really simple to use, I haven't figured out how to make it use any of the public key repositories. So, I now have two public keys. It's on my list of things to fix asap.

web traffic. If you have steering advice, it would be helpful because this seems to be an open-ended research project at the moment ... and getting wider.

Yes, Danny, there's a decided interest in the subjects broached;- and thank you for the abstract on the article, which for one reason or another I couldn't seem to get up in HTLM format. As for my advice -- I'm afraid it would no less frustrating than an impression of what I'm generally reading: A pink-slip notice from some ISPs is in part a collusion between the entertainment industry and the ISPs, as endorsed within a political climate sympathetic to their proposals and intent. Therefore, within the very structures as wouldn't permit such as alternative routes, notably smaller ISPs which have surfaced to state an intent not to follow these quasi-laws and their ramifications, especially so, people are to be found stepping forward to say they've been "bagged and tagged," identified and incriminated to an extant, yet while the higher laws do not permit, within a constitutional degree, exercising enforcement agencies to impose felony charges;- to a lessor degree, inclusive of the aforementioned alternative ISP routes, as well any agency or interest thereof you've in response proposed, a severity of focus, though it may be mitigatory, is in no sense absolute or binding beyond a transitory sense.

I think what we're looking at here, Danny, is a particularly American bit of proclivity for grabbing ass. One in ten Americans, at some point, will be incarcerated during their life within the largest penal and supportive legal infrastructure the world has seen. In perhaps a gross oversimplification -- admittedly that no doubt some in fact deserve what they reap, and, all aside another popular American drama- queen act to follow: to indeed ensure they do and are prosecuted within a full extent the law allows -- it is, nevertheless, analogous to playing the numbers on Friday night with a drink in your hand. They're out there in droves, have little doubt, only when they hit the "check points," will that be with one drink to qualify for a DWI, or more, in the instance of a DUI;- what court defense costs and a subsequent life adjustment will there be, if any, proceeding judgments and fines, probationary status, then, is in a manner of odds seen one both random and fraught with uncertainty. These intents are so many self-identified "messages," after all, at variance to popular practises and norms a society, as a whole, overall exercises;- placed so to stand to test a time to heel-in a spirit of peoples, perhaps, over a cumulative representative of interests sponsoring their passage;- as you, or I, are will be accountable for resultant operands to witness and record their effects.

-- Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. - TM

Ditto on encrypting the payload, but you can do AES-256 with 7-zip, then phone in the password. This is far easier for someone not set up for PGP.

One tip with 7-zip is that not all the compression schemes are multi-threaded. If you care about speed, use bzip2.

Steve Blank has written up the dish/CIA connection in the link below, but you can google around for video of the presentations he has done on the "Secret History of Silicon Valley.]

"The idea was to point radar dishes at the moon, and then use the moon as a bistatic reflector and listen for the Tall King signals. About once a month everything would line up. But because this idea required very large dishes, the United States in the late 1950s became very interested in radio astronomy."

Personally, I think it would have been simpler to bribe some commie with money and women than build all these dishes.

That's a decent summary.

I think it's reasonable to hide the IP address from the final entity.

For example, if I download a torrent, the torrent should appear to be going to an IP address that isn't mine.

Likewise, if I log into Google, it should be from an IP address which isn't mine.

Similarly, my nntp posting host headers should be an obfuscation of an IP address that isn't mine.

And, if I visit a web page, it should be from an IP address which isn't mine - from the perspective of the final entity.

Keeping on topic, I think the best freeware chance of this is either from VPN software or from tor software.

Good news for web anonymity!

The Tor browser bundle (TBB) was trivially simple to set up.

Actually, there was no setup.

All I did was download the pre-configured Firefox browser and it just worked. It didn't even need to be downloaded to my hard disk (a flash drive would have sufficed).

So, at least we can score one for freeware to gain web based anonymity.

Of course, the TBB freeware doesn't work for nntp or torrents, but it instantly granted me a modicum of anonymity for Gmail and for web browsing.

a) All my logins to Gmail 'appeared' to come from Budapest! (Gmail noticed it and enforced additional security.)

b) All my web page lookups (e.g., whatismyipaddress.com) appeared to come from Budapest.