A Collection of anonymity tutorials

A while back I started a series of posts on my main blog that aim to show how to write an anonymous blog that, as long as you're careful with the details that you post, cannot be traced back to you.

I will take a second to give fair warning that while I don't believe this to be at all complicated, it's also not something I would expect anyone to accomplish in a single afternoon. Give yourself some time to become familiar with the stuff in each step before going on to the next. It'll save a lot of confusion later on.

This series begins with how to surf the web anonymously:

Anonymous Web Surfing

How to browse the web without leaving a trail that identifies you.

I'm going to have to do an update on that topic but this post has still got useful information in it. Hint, stick with TOR.

Because the process that I worked out for blogging anonymously uses email to submit posts, the next several posts involve details about how to send anonymous email. That part of the series begins with installing PGP because you need encryption for that to work.

Anonymous Email - Step one: You need PGP

One of the topics that I’ve been planning to cover here involves how to send anonymous email because I want to talk about how to blog anonymously and in order to do that, you need to be able to send email that cannot be traced back to you.

Once PGP is installed and you've had a chance to become familiar with how it works, it's time to start getting set up with the software needed for anonymous email. For that, you need a great little program called "Jack B. Nymble" (JBN)

Anonymous Email - Step Two: Jack B. Nymble

At this point I’m assuming that you have PGP 6.5.8 installed and have taken some time to become familiar with how to create keys and sign and/or encrypt text messages.

Once JBN is set up, it's a good idea to expand it's capability by installing Mixmaster. The next article in the series covers doing that.

Anonymous Email - Step Three: Adding Mixmaster

Adding mixmaster capability to Jack B. Nymble
By adding Mixmaster, you get the ability to use Type II remailers as well. Type II remailers are designed with higher security in mind and to be resistant to things like replay attacks (where messages are captured by an attacker and resent lots of times to create a large trail of traffic in an attempt to follow the message)

Now that you've gotten this far, it's time to send that first anonymous message just to see if you've got it right.

Anonymous Email - Step Four: Sending Your First Msg

Now that you've got the pieces in place this is a quick tutorial that walks through sending anonymous email messages with Jack B. Nymble.

That's as far as it's gotten so far. Next up will be coverage of mail2news gateways and posting anonymously to UseNet (which too many people confuse with 'google groups', no, they're NOT the same!) After that I'll go over the process of creating a "Nym", which is a pseudonymous email address. It has the advantage of being completely anonymous, since it uses anonymous remailers but it has special features which make it possible to receive email while staying anonymous.

After all that, I'll tie it all together in a procedure that allows you to create and post in a blog that is as anonymous as whatever you write in it. (well, if you post something that only you could know, or reveal identifying information in your posts, then you've just blown the privacy you built with doing things anonymously)