The Hitchhiker's Guide to Online Anonymity

[usonian]

https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html
This is highly technical for people who really need anonymity (i.e. reporters in danger of retaliation)
This guide is a non-profit open-source initiative, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (cc-by-nc-4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
This is only the introduction!

For a simpler guide, see my post.
Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access
https://democraticunderground.com/109530002
or just go the source, EFF
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access
CC BY license, https://www.eff.org/copyright "You do NOT have to ask permission to post original EFF material on a mailing list or newsgroup"

I am leaving references unresolved. Please go to the site.

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Introduction:

TLDR for the whole guide: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play” 4.

Making a social media account with a pseudonym or artist/brand name is easy. And it is enough in most use cases to protect your identity as the next George Orwell. There are plenty of people using pseudonyms all over Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn/TikTok/Snapchat/Reddit/… But the vast majority of those are anything but anonymous and can easily be traced to their real identity by your local police officers, random people within the OSINT5 (Open-Source Intelligence) community, and trolls6 on 4chan7.

This is a good thing as most criminals/trolls are not tech-savvy and will usually be identified with ease. But this is also a terrible thing as most political dissidents, human rights activists and whistleblowers can also be tracked rather easily.

This guide aims to provide an introduction to various de-anonymization techniques, tracking techniques, ID verification techniques, and optional guidance to creating and maintaining reasonably and truly online anonymous identities including social media accounts safely. This includes mainstream platforms and not only the privacy-friendly ones.

It is important to understand that the purpose of this guide is anonymity and not just privacy but much of the guidance you will find here will also help you improve your privacy and security even if you are not interested in anonymity. There is an important overlap in techniques and tools used for privacy, security, and anonymity but they differ at some point:

Privacy is about people knowing who you are but not knowing what you are doing.

Anonymity is about people knowing what you are doing but not knowing who you are 8.


(Illustration from9)

Will this guide help you protect yourself from the NSA, the FSB, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Mossad if they are out to find you? Probably not … Mossad will be doing “Mossad things” 10 and will probably find you no matter how hard you try to hide11.

You must consider your threat model12 before going further.

(Illustration by Randall Munroe, xkcd.com, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5)

Will this guide help you protect your privacy from OSINT researchers like Bellingcat13, Doxing14 trolls on 4chan15, and others that have no access to the NSA toolbox? More likely. Tho we would not be so sure about 4chan.

Here is a basic simplified threat model for this guide:



(Note that the “magical amulets/submarine/fake your own death” jokes are quoted from the excellent article “This World of Ours” by James Mickens, 2014above10)

Disclaimer: Jokes aside (magical amulet…). Of course, there are also advanced ways to mitigate attacks against such advanced and skilled adversaries but those are just out of the scope of this guide. It is crucially important that you understand the limits of the threat model of this guide. And therefore, this guide will not double in size to help with those advanced mitigations as this is just too complex and will require an exceedingly high knowledge and skill level that is not expected from the targeted audience of this guide.

The EFF provides a few security scenarios of what you should consider depending on your activity. While some of those tips might not be within the scope of this guide (more about Privacy than Anonymity), they are still worth reading as examples. See https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/security-scenarios [Archive.org].

If you want to go deeper into threat modeling, see Appendix B3: Threat modeling resources.

You might think this guide has no legitimate use but there are many16’17’18’19’20’21’22 such as:

Evading Online Censorship23
Evading Online Oppression
Evading Online Stalking, Doxxing, and Harassment
Evading Online Unlawful Government Surveillance
Anonymous Online Whistle Blowing
Anonymous Online Activism
Anonymous Online Journalism
Anonymous Online Legal Practice
Anonymous Online Academic Activities (For instance accessing scientific research where such resources are blocked). See note below.

…

This guide is written with hope for those good-intended individuals who might not be knowledgeable enough to consider the big picture of online anonymity and privacy.

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[Cheezoholic]

1. Great Post! n/t