HIDING FROM GOVERNMENT

However it happened, it is now clear that the US spy agencies, and the NSA in particular, have gone off the reservation.

The military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about has turned inward, and the perps are now us. That may be a bitter pill for many of us to swallow, but it’s true just the same.

After all, don’t we all lower our voices when bringing up subjects that governments might not like? Haven’t we thought about moving to safer locations? People don’t do those things where truth and justice reign.

So, here we are. For most of our lives, we thought it was only criminals who needed to hide from government. Now we find that it’s time for the citizens to hide. Sad as that may be, it’s something we need to face.

Before I explain how to hide, let me repeat something that a lot of us have said before: We do not hide because our works are criminal, but because we need to protect ourselves from criminal punishments, seizures and prosecutions.

There are tens of thousands of laws in the United States these days, and no one – not even the country’s greatest lawyers – can remember them all. Furthermore, public prosecutors operate by the principles of politics rather than justice.

The whole law enforcement system is operating beyond reason these days. How else can we explain cops shutting down lemonade stands run by little girls?

We are hiding, not because our deeds are evil, but because the enforcers have become rich, arrogant, self-righteous, and dangerously evil. Again, that’s a sad thing for us to face, but every time we lower our voices when speaking the truth, we affirm it as fact.

The Crypto Wars

We all use cryptography these days. Every time you buy something online, or log into your bank’s web site, you’re using it – that’s what the little lock symbol in your browser and the https in the address bar mean.

Cryptography is simply applied mathematics. But by using math carefully, we can make it very easy to encode messages, and almost impossible to decode them, unless you have the missing piece of the formula.

In about 1990, we had the first crypto war. Until then, the US government classified cryptography as a munition – as a weapon. And, just like now, they wanted full and permanent domination of all information. Encryption was forbidden. To make sure that everyone felt their dominance, the FBI ran an operation with one of their über-cool names, to "crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities." They called it Operation Sun Devil.

Bear in mind that this happened before the Internet; the evil systems that were overrun with dangerous monsters were Bell Telephone and the old bulletin board systems.

This combined FBI/Secret Service crackdown was primarily a publicity stunt (complete with a lot of failed prosecutions), but it spawned a movement of self-defense in the nascent digital community.

On one side formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have opposed law enforcement excesses ever since. On the other, it pushed a cryptographer named Phil Zimmerman to release (quietly) a free, simple cryptography program called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

And, by the way, the biggest "hacking crime" of the time was called Phreaking, which involved manipulating the telephone system to get free calls. And guess who was selling a Phreaking box at the time… Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the guys who were just about to start Apple Computer.

Here’s a photo of them building (or maybe shipping) one of their Blue Box units in 1975:

At present, we are involved in a new crypto war. Our goal is to stay away from the Big Brother state that has formed around us, and to maintain ownership of our lives: To hold to our rights as free men and women, and not to consent to electronic serfdom.

And you’d be surprised at how many non-geek types are getting in on it. There are even "crypto parties" springing up – informal gatherings where people learn how to use cryptography.

This time it’s not just the technically minded who need to protect themselves. We’re all online now, and electronic serfdom would encompass huge portions of our lives.

Encryption & Anonymity

Before we continue, it’s important to understand the difference between encryption and anonymity:

• Encryption uses math to scramble your communications. Snoops can see that you are communicating, but they can’t understand what you are saying.
• Anonymity hides your identity. Snoops might be able to hear the communications, but they can’t see who is talking to whom.

Obviously, we want both encryption and anonymity. Neither one, by itself, is sufficient. If the snoops can hear what we say, we haven’t lowered our voices nearly enough. And if they know who talks to whom, how often, how long, and so on, we simply become information serfs by a different path.

Our communications need to be both encrypted and anonymous.

How To Do It

There are two primary ways to do this: Either you learn the necessary technical skills or you pay someone to do it for you.

Learning the technical skills is not as hard as you may think, but it will require time, and especially time to get comfortable with the technologies.

Briefly, you need: 

• PGP (or the free, GnuPG version) for encryption.
• An anonymity technology. Tor is the more popular one, but I2P is probably better.
• A secure email system.
• A secure chat system.
• A secure voice communications system.

And, most of all, you have to USE them – all the time.

The online privacy company I am involved with, Cryptohippie, publishes a free guide that tells you how to do this all by yourself. You can find it (as a PDF) here.

If you don’t want to take on the security job yourself, you’ll need to hire a company like mine to do it for you. But if you do, make very sure you are buying a quality product. Here’s the information you need:

Any product of this type (and they generally go under the name VPN, or virtual private network) should have the features listed below. You don’t have to understand all of these terms, but you must ask about them and get positive answers:

• No single company should have your payment records and your Internet use data.
•  The system must use a minimum of two jurisdictionally-aware hops.

•  It must have protection against DNS leakage.

•  It must incorporate rotating IP addresses.

•   It must have real customer service.

• · They MUST run their own Private Key Infrastructure (and NOT use certificate agencies).

Again, the crucial points here are that you must get the right protection, and you must use it every day. That’s why I think it’s better for most people to pay for a competent service; one that will help you if you have a problem.

Then again, maybe you are one of those innocent folks who "have nothing to hide."  But it’s not a matter of hiding, it’s a matter of preserving.  Your privacy. 

Remember that Lenin defined the Communist state as one in which "nothing is private," a total lack of privacy.  We are moving towards that totalitarian lack of privacy with astonishing speed.  It is up to you to preserve your privacy and to start doing so now.

Paul Rosenberg –"prosenberg1" in the TTP Forum — is a computer security specialist and founder of Cryptohippie.  TTP endorses Cryptohippie for your personal online security.