How to be Anonymous Online (8 page)

If a user cannot initially obtain Zerocoins through a transaction, she will purchase or accept basecoins, and then convert those to Zerocoins. Once the user has Zerocoins, they can be spent without revealing the coin amount or addresses of the parties involved and without relying on a central authority. Importantly, the Zerocoins will not need to be spent in the same amount as the original basecoin conversion (an improvement upon the original Zerocoin project). In other words, a user can convert two basecoins into two Zerocoins, and then only spend one. As long as the two parties in the transaction are willing to accept Zerocoins, there will be no need to convert back to basecoins, although that will be an option. The Zerocash project remains in the testing phase.

In my opinion, for crypto-currencies to achieve widespread use, they must incorporate anonymity. Imagine if all of your financial records are public. Your coworkers will see your income. Your useless friend that needs a loan or your needy pastor that wants to remodel the chapel will know your bank balance. Your nosy neighbor will tell everyone you are broke and a month behind on your Mercedes payment. If the current Bitcoin becomes a dominant currency, this will be your reality.

On my blog (
https://howtobeanonymousonline.info/
) I will keep you up to date on crypto-currency anonymity innovations.

At the source, anyone spying on your home internet connection can see if you are using Tor (You Are Not Stealth). They cannot see what you are doing, whom you are talking to or what you are reading. All they know is that you are going somewhere, and they will probably not find out where (You Are Secure).

In the middle, out in the Tor network, spies can see activity. They cannot see what it is, where it came from or where it is going (You Are Secure).

At the destination, wherever that may be, spies can see Tor users visiting. They cannot see who the visitors are or where they came from (You Are Secure).

On a grand scale, this is all the security you need. It does not matter that you are not stealth. Since you are one person out of hundreds of thousands floating across the Tor network every second, it should not be inferred which of those anonymous connections is yours. On an intimate scale, this is not the case.

During December 2013's final exam's week, Harvard University was emailed a bomb threat. Upon reviewing the email, the FBI could see that it was sent using the Guerrilla Mail service from a Tor IP address. From there, they searched Harvard's system records for all students that accessed Tor around the time of the email. Next, they asked those students if they sent the bomb threat. One student, a Korean whose surname happens to be Kim, confessed (I swear to God, it was a Korean named Kim).

I only use this story as an example of blowing one's cover because the good morality stories do not make the news. Please do not send any bomb threats. You will make us both look like a--holes.

The Germans used the “unbreakable” Enigma machine to encrypt communications during WWII. Unfortunately for the Nazis, the United Kingdom’s Ultra program broke Enigma, and the Brits read their sh-t. See the story in the movie
The Imitation Game
!

In the 1950's, the United States was flying over the Soviet Union with a badass spy-plane called the U-2. Even though the Soviet's could see it, it was too high to shoot down. Then, on May Day, 1960, the Soviets shot one down.

In the 1970's, the Data Encryption Standard was developed and implemented as the United States' federal standard for data encryption. In 1998, it was broken by brute force using background processing power provided by volunteers on the internet.

Eventually, all security is breached. When? Who knows. Apply the analogies as you see fit.

Stay ethical. Stay legal. Have fun.

A M Eydie

***

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***

To donate to Tails, visit:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/how/donate
.

***

If you want to send an e-card to taunt or praise Kim Jong-Un, one of these cheerleaders for human equality can forward it to him:
http://www.korea-dpr.com/organization.html
. Long live the Kim's!

***

BONUS Section ahead → → →

WARNING – This is cool, but not highly secure.

This works on microSD cards formatted by Android phones. Like Tails, Android is a Linux-based operating system; therefore, they use the same file format.

A quick preview of what you are going to do... You will format your microSD card with your phone, and then install Tails using a program called UNetbootin.

The following
instructions, with screenshots, are posted at
https://howtobeanonymousonline.info/tutorial/sdcard-2/

• phone and its microSD card
  
• microSD card USB adapter
  
• a Tails.iso file. Save yourself a bunch of time by putting the .iso file on a flash drive before you go through the following steps. That will save you from having to re-download it in Tails.
  

1. Boot Tails from your DVD (you are using the DVD because you will be downloading software into Tails. You do not want changes made that can carry over to future sessions)
   
2. At the
   Welcome to Tails
   screen, choose
   Yes
   for
   More Options?
   
3. Create an Administration password, and then
   Login
   (other options can remain unchanged)
   

1. In Tails, connect to the internet
   
2. Once online, go to the top toolbar and select
   Applications
   > System Tools
   >
   Administration
   >
   Synaptic Package Manager
   
3. When asked, enter your Administration password and click
   OK
   
4. The Synaptic Package Manager will open. It is a database of programs that you can easily install in Linux, and therefore Tails. At the moment, you will only see programs that are currently installed on your system
   
5. At the
   top-left corner of the window, click
   Reload
   . The
   Download Package Information
   window will open (if you get an error, double check to make sure you are online). You will see that it is downloading new package information. It might take 10 minutes, or so, to finish
   
6. Click
   the
   Search
   button at the top-right corner of the Synaptic Package Manager window. Type
   unetbootin
   in the search field and click
   search
   
7. A few package options will be displayed. Right-click
   unetbootin
   and select
   Mark for installation
   
8. Click the
   Apply
   button at the top
   
9. In the
   Summary
   window, click
   Apply
   . You will see it downloading and installing.
   
10. Once the
    Changes applied
    window opens, click
    Close
    
11. You can close Synaptic Package Manager.
    

1. With your phone, format the microSD Card (every phone is different, but you probably go somewhere like Settings > Memory > Format)
   

The next steps quickly become confusing, so I am going to be specific.

1. Back in Tails, double-click the
   Computer
   icon on the desktop. It will open
   the File Browser
   
2. Once the File Browser window is open, insert the
   formatted microSD card with USB adapter into your computer
   
3. You will see a new drive icon appear in the File Browser window (probably named Generic Mass-Storage). Double-click this
   icon to reveal its contents
   
4. You will see the file folders your phone put on the card when it was formatted (Documents, Music, Photos, etc.)
   

Even though you cannot see it yet, the microSD card drive is now “mounted” to /dev/sd
a
1. This will matter in a minute.

If you need to download the Tails.iso file, see the
Downloading and Authenticating Tails
section for instructions.

1. If you chose to download Tails beforehand onto a second flash drive, insert it now. Just as before, find its icon and double click it. Once you open it, it will also be “mounted.” This time to /dev/sd
   b
   1 (
   as
   opposed to sd
   a
   1)
   .
   

Now that the drives are inserted and mounted...

1. Open the
   Terminal
   (from the top toolbar, select
   Applications
   >
   Accessories
   >
   Terminal
   )
   
2. In the terminal, type
   unetbootin
   and press Enter
   
3. Enter your Administrative password and click
   OK
   
4. UNetbootin will open
   
5. Tick the bullet for
   Diskimage
   (it is the second choice)
   
6. Select
   ISO
   from the drop-down menu.
   
7. On the same line as
   Diskimage
   and
   ISO
   , click the little box with “
   ...
   ” in it. The
   Open Disk Image File
   window will open
   
8. Find your Tails.iso file. If you downloaded it to the Amnesia folder, go to the left column and select
   File System
   >
   home
   >
   amnesia
   . If it is on your flash drive, select the drive from the left column. When you find your Tails.iso file, click it, and then click
   Open
   
9. Now, you are back in the UNetbootin window. On the bottom line, make sure
   Type:
   is
   USB Drive
   and
   Drive:
   is
   /dev/sda1
   .
   
10. Click
    OK
    
11. It will take five to ten minutes for Tails to install. Do not worry if the progress bar stalls around 84% (it stalls because the particular file it is working on is large).
    
12. Once it tells you “
    Installation Complete, Reboot
    ” you can
    Exit
    .
    
13. When you boot from the microSD card, you will notice that the boot process has changed. Instead of the black “Boot Tails” screen with the 'Live' and 'Live (failsafe)' options, you will be taken to a blue blue screen with a few other choices, starting with
    Default
    . Just use your arrow key to go down and select
    Live
    .
    
14. You are done. You can boot into Tails, and you can use the card in your phone to save pictures, music and whatever else.
    

Unfortunately, you cannot create a persistence volume. If you do, you will wipe out everything your phone saved to the card.

WARNING... Again
–
I DO NOT CONSIDER THIS SECURE
. I can imagine too many scenarios in which Kim Jong-Un can hack your phone and manipulate your SD card from Pyongyang.

Secure or not, having a secret operating system in your phone is pretty cool, especially when you can use it to boot someone's computer.

Go impress somebody in the Chess Club.

1: Jianwen Sun, Zongkai Yang, Sanya Liu, Pei Wang, Applying Stylometric Analysis Techniques to Counter Anonymity in Cyberspace, 2012

2: Iqbal, Farkhund, Hamad Binsalleeh, Benjamin Fung, and Mourad Debbabi, Mining writeprints from anonymous e-mails for forensic investigation, 2010

3: Michael Brennan, Rachel Greenstadt, Deceiving Authorship Detection, 2011

4: Aylin Caliskan, Rachel Greenstadt, Translate once, translate twice, translate thrice and attribute: Identifying authors and machine translation tools in translated text, 2012

5: M. Schmid, Computer-aided Writeprint Modeling For Cybercrime Investigations, 2012

6: Michael Brennan, Rachel Greenstadt, Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques, 2009

7: Meiklejohn, Sarah, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names, 2013