A Review Of Privacy Services
I value my privacy. I do not believe that big brother has a right to know anything about my personal life that I do not choose to tell them. However, because both the government and large American corporations are making a habit and big business of snooping in on unsuspecting Americans, I have decided to take control over what Big Brother sees when I am on the net. There are number of ways to do this. The three most important are:
Hiding your IP via a VPN
Clearing your cookies regularly
Using a secure mail service
These are the most critical things one can to to protect oneself from snooping, some of which is quite illegal but done with the tacit approval of US authorities. Many people think that these services are only for those who visit illegal sites or are involved in piracy. This simply is not true. A great many people are using these services today for the simple fact that they do not want anyone to spy on them. Some may ask; doesn't using a service like this draw unwanted attention to yourself? The short answer is no. Millions use VPN's as almost all corporations that allow one to access their corporate computers from an employees home or on the road employ VPN's. They are very common and the uses for them are 99% of the time legitimate.
Clearing your cookies can be done easily and safely using a variety of extensions in Firefox and if you have not switched over, you should. Internet Explorer has a history of serious security flaws and is target number one of hackers. I do not recommend it. Firefox is highly customizable and easy to use. One of the tools I like is Prefbar, which is my favorite in Firefox. It allows you to clear cookies, disable Java, clear your cache and history with a single click. If you don't like that extension you can use Cookie Culler. There are many others out there, but I find these meet my needs. Also, when you set up your proxy, which is required from some of the services listed below, it can be easily accessed with a simple click using Prefbar. Another great proxy tool that will help you with some of these services is Switch Proxy.
Secure email services can be either encrypted or in the open using alias accounts on secure servers. Encrypted e-mail is fine but it is a hassle. I use aliases on different servers in various countries and never associate my real mane with it. I know this sounds shady, but if you want to talk to someone you trust over the web and do not want big brother listening, this is by far the best. You data goes over the web and looks like any other unencrypted mail and if you use a VPN, your IP is hidden. There is no way for snoops to know who is talking. Yes, they can know what is said but that is all. Even with this you can still encrypt your mail using a free encryption tool such as PGP. However, I would be very careful of services that offer encrypted mail. Some of them are very closely monitored by big brother for some pretty good reasons. In fact, I suspect some of them are even secretly run by big brother. Best bet; Find a service that has its servers located outside of the US.
I have used a number of services in the past and here I will give you four that I can recommend. Their pro's and cons. You decide which is best for you.
Pros: Very fast, reliable, high encryption
Easy to use and install.
Secure Email
Cons: US company
$250/hr research charge for unauthorized activities.
Low-to-nonexistant degree of privacy from 'official requests' for information.
I recommend this service for the novice who just wants to protect himself from snooping by their ISP. This is becoming common. ISP's are not talking about what they agreed to when they met with the AG recently. But I have noticed one little change at my IP. In the past, every couple of months I would get a new IP address. Now it has been several months since mine has changed. I suspect that one concession they made was to keep their IP static to assist the FBI tracking users. How much logging is done is not known, though most claim not to log Internet activity the recent revelation of data from AOL shows that this practice is probably more widespread than they admit or even reveal in their privacy agreements.
What this service does is create a pseudo Virtual Private Network between your computer and those at Secure Tunnel. This is an encrypted connection that prevents your ISP from snooping on you. It also prevents any site you visit from knowing your IP address, which can be used to identify you and your surfing habits. I kind of look at my IP address as a kind of 'phone number'. You may not be able to tell who I am just by looking at it, but someone who really wanted to know could find out. That is how I look at IP's. I do recommend Secure-Tunnel for most ordinary people who want privacy on the net. However, be aware their tech support can be categorized as 'fair' at best and outages and disconnects seem to be more and more commonplace. Cost: $7.95/mo
Pro's: Fast service, reliable easy to set up their PPTP VPN and a little more involved for their Open SSH VPN.
30 servers located around the world.
No logs. Separate payment system.
Extremely private.
Secure E-mail
Con's: None, but some have complained about paying and not receiving the service. Others (findnot's competitors) complain about easy to fix 'security breaches'.
Findnot has almost become synonymous with privacy. There is simply no way for Findnot to pass info to authorities as they have none to hand over. Even their customer names are not known to them. Because they are located offshore, this makes harassment by US authorities very difficult, though I know they have tried. Their main servers are also located outside of the US but have other servers located here in the US.
US authorities are becoming increasingly gestapo like and want to know everything about everyone. Thus, I highly recommend that one find a service whose headquarters are located outside the US and is not subject to the US Department of Justice and its often politically motivated harassment and extremely selective enforcement. This is not a slam at those who work at the DOJ, many of whom decry the politicization of the department. Rather it is a word of warning, that they will sooner or later go after the data of these kinds of services located in the US with their broad subpoena power. Remember the Google affair. The threat is real.
Also, this service has a great secure mail system that should ONLY be used when connected to their VPN. Cost $29.95 for three months
Pros: Fast, fairly reliable, very inexpensive located in Sweden. L2TP/IPsec service.
Cons: New, associated with a 'Pirate Party' (a real political party).
Very difficult to set up their L2TP as their software does not work.
This is a new service and I like it, though I had some real problems setting up their L2TP VPN on my computers. Their software not only does not work, it cannot work as the information needed to go into certain fields cannot be filled in. This is a serious problem if you want the added security of L2TP. Their PPTP is much easier to use but not quite as secure. Also, the L2TP can be a bit unreliable, often dropping without notification. This can be changed by adjusting some of the settings.
Despite the problems, I do like this service because combining the higher encryption that L2TP gives you with the very reasonable price. It is a hard combination to beat. However their service is not quite as fast as the other two as there is the natural latency problem as their servers are located in Sweden. But for normal surfing with a cable modem connection, the drop off in performance is noticeable but far from unbearable, ordinary web-pages load and render fast but downloads can suffer.
Pro's: Free, very secure.
Con's: Often dead slow.
Takes a little know how to set up.
First despite that fact that is it is very slow, it is a good service and unlike some of the L2TP and PTPP services above, your real IP cannot accidentally leak. This and Open SSH are the best for lock down security against this from happening. I admit since I pay for my services, I do not have to deal with Tor much, other than to test its reliability and functionality from time to time. Overall there is nothing wrong with this free service if you don't mind waiting for long periods for pages to render and then 10 minutes later having a blazing fast connection. These are the realities of Tor, but what can you expect, its free!
This is an excellent service. It provides excellent speeds near perfect connections which Ih have yet to have broken from their end. It provides anonymous payment and has a host of other services it provides. It is an excellent service as far as it goes. But what I say in the conclusion of this article goes double here. The service is very, very good.... perhaps, too good.
This is a good service, especially for the price. Being only 4.95 a month it beats em all when it comes to price. Originally set up to assist journalists in foreign nations to access the net and mail in restricted nations, the service is available to anyone who can pay. The speeds are decent and with OpenVpn your entire Internet connection is encrypted and this is a good thing. But keep this important fact in mind when using this service or any VPN based on OpenVPN, do not enable folder sharing, it is conceivably possible for someone on the backend of such a service to access your files.
Privacy should be a concern to you. If it isn't rest assured, it will be soon. I recommend using one of the above services for your own protection. But remember this; not clearing your cookies out defeats the purpose. Cookies from advertisers, Yahoo, MSN, Google and all the other big sites should be removed as soon as possible, as in just after you finish using their cookie required services. Despite what they say, many of these services do track where you go and then throw ads at you in your mailbox. This was a serious problem I noticed with one big name service, I do not know if this is true anymore as I do not access my (name removed) inbox nearly as often as I used to. I also notice that Google seems to be able to break both the PTPP and L2TP connections when logging into a GMAIL account, thus acquiring your real IP. This has happened to me several times and cannot be a coincidence. Increasingly, I am beginning to distrust Google more and more. The best thing to do if you use their services is to keep in mind that they are watching. Once they went Public they have, in my estimation, become the very 'evil' they claimed they were not. I do use some of their services but am very selective about when and how I use them. As one former intelligence officer put it to me, “Google just seems to be scooping up hordes of information and nobody knows where it is going and no one is asking any questions. Until questions are resolved as to some allegations to its ties to the Russian Mafia, I won't use it.” Now this officer was quick to say these ties were very tenuous and did not want to accuse them, still... But what troubled him most was that no one (especially the DOJ) would touch it. Now I don't want to be too hard on Google, I mean lets get real the rest are hardly any better ( Yahoo, MSN...) but everyone seems to have somekind of Google account so beware....
I would be remiss if I did not say this to each of you. Most of the privacy services above are run by spooks (intelligence services such as MI-5/6, Mossad, FBI, CIA, DSGE... you name it) and a couple may even be run by criminals. It is very difficult to find one these days that is 'clean' and I have been warned by techies with 'connections' that finding a non-compromised privacy service is becoming harder and harder. So why would you pay for one of these services? Bottom line is this; your data and IP are being recorded weather you know it or not by services you trust. Sometimes you can stumble on sites that are malicious and the last thing you want to give them is your IP or any information about you. Data is being compiled on you and the sites you visit are being recorded. Using a service like this stops this from happening, that is if the service you choose honors their agreements, and I suspect that most don't. The only service that I feel comfortable recommending to my readers in light of this is Secure-Tunnel. The rest are questionable, some more so than others, so be aware. If you want to try one but aren't quite sure about them you take this advice, you should not use their service for e-mail unless it is secured (ie SSL). Also sites that do not have secure password access (look for the keylock on your statusbar if you are not sure) should not be used with privacy services you do not trust. On a side note obtaining some kind of Secure Mail service is a very,very good idea. Why? Because unsecured e-mail can be read by others or scooped up into databases that go to who-knows-where for who-knows-what. Be aware of this threat it is one you should take seriously. Did I mention you should get some kind of secure mail?
Another privacy concern that I have personally are these huge data warehouses that pay for information on people. It is impossible to tell if these big Internet services that offer 'free this' and 'free that', are just out there to gather as much information on people as they can in order to sell it to these warehouses. There is just is no way to tell and even if they deny it, chances are good that they could very well be doing it anyway. The only way to protect yourself today is to NOT RELY ON ANYONE ELSE TO DO IT FOR YOU. Assume that most of the large expensively designed sites you visit are going to try and gather as much information about you as they can and not tell you that this is what they are doing. Assume that your ISP will soon be gathering information on your surfing habits so that if Big Brother asks, they can hand it over in return for a wink and a nod that the next time they want to merge with another Telecom giant, it will be approved. Suffice it to say that I have little confidence in the DOJ's political appointee's integrity or respect for our Constitutional rights. Additionally, I want to add this important factor as well; Today these giant data warehouses could very easily have been infiltrated by criminals (in fact I am fairly certain some of them have been) who are able to gather information surreptitiously to pass on to criminal networks. These entities are unregulated and no one seems to want to ask any question about their activities. When one considers the questionable activities of companies like Diebold (who make the nations ATM's) and ChoicePoint (who was involved in removing names from voting rolls in Florida) had in our nations election debacles, your suspicion of them is not only deserved, it is wise.
Finally, the last thing I want is for someone to use this guide as a way to commit a crime or engage in unethical activities. This guide is not for criminals, it is for ordinary folks who do not want Big brother snooping into their personal lives via technology. Sadly, cyber-criminals make it hard on everyone. But using these services can reduce the threat of cybercrime committed against you.
Surf smart!
Mark S. Watson