"Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques that protect the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated that they can often “reidentify” or “deanonymize” individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so." "Easy reidentification represents a sea change not only in technology but in our understanding of privacy. It undermines decades of assumptions about robust anonymization, assumptions that have charted the course for business relationships, individual choices, and government regulations. Regulators must respond rapidly and forcefully to this disruptive technological shift, to restore balance to the law and protect all of us from imminent, significant harm. They must do this without leaning on the easy-to-apply, appealingly nondisruptive, but hopelessly flawed crutch of personally identifiable information. This Article offers the difficult but necessary way forward: Regulators must use the factors provided to assess the risks of reidentification and carefully balance these risks against countervailing values. Although reidentification science poses significant new challenges, it also lifts the veil that for too long has obscured privacy debates. By focusing regulators and other participants in these debates much more sharply on the costs and benefits of unfettered information flow, reidentification will make us answer questions we have too long avoided. We face new challenges, indeed, but we should embrace this opportunity to reexamine old privacy questions under a powerful new light."

"Vint Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the internet, acknowledges that he and co-founder Bob Kahn did not think enough about security when they built the framework for the web. He shares a view held by a growing number of experts that the best way to defend against cyberattacks might be to simply start again. “I would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication – where did this email come from, what device I am talking to . . . those things are elements that would make a big difference,” Mr Cerf says. … Mr Cerf said the ubiquity of the present internet need not block the adoption of a new version. “I’m actually quite interested in the clean-slate ideas,” Mr Cerf said. “People will say, ‘Oh you can never do that, it’s already too deeply embedded in everything else.’ But you could have said that of the telephone system in 1973, and the internet is replacing the telephone system.”"

Schmidt "replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information. Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It's obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn't use G+. Regarding countries like Iran and Syria, people there have no expectation of privacy anyway due to their government's own policies, which implies (to me, at least) that Schmidt thinks there's no point of even trying to have a service that allows pseudonyms. Unfortunately, the way the Q&A was conducted, I wasn't in a position to ask him a followup on this particular point. He also said the internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward."

"Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It's nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it's to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they're pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it's not a real identity to them: it's a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won't magically induce civility: the trolls don't care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence. If Google want to do it right, they're going to have to ditch their naming policy completely and redo from scratch. To get it right, they need to acknowledge that not everyone has a name of the form John Smith or Jane Doe; that not everyone uses the same character set or same number of names. They might be able to get away with insisting on a name that appears on a piece of government-issued ID; but then they need to acknowledge that people have legitimate reasons for using one or more pseudonyms, allow users to register pseudonyms associated with that name, attach pseudonyms to different (or even overlapping) circles of friends, and give the user a "keep my real name secret" check-button. Then and only then they'll begin to develop a system that has some hope of working."

"Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it has empowered all of them to different degrees. … Authoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies. … On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government should consider blocking access to social media for people who plot violence or disorder. … We tolerate such drastic proposals only because acts of terror briefly deprive us of the ability to think straight. We are also distracted by the universal tendency to imagine technology as a liberating force; it keeps us from noticing that governments already have more power than is healthy. The domestic challenges posed by the Internet demand a measured, cautious response in the West. … To the rest of the world, the efforts of Western nations, and especially the U.S., to promote democracy abroad have often smacked of hypocrisy. How could the West lecture others while struggling to cope with its own internal social contradictions? … In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East. Should America and Europe abandon any pretense of even wanting to promote democracy abroad? Or should they try to figure out how to increase the resilience of their political institutions in the face of the Internet? As much as our leaders might congratulate themselves for embracing the revolutionary potential of these new technologies, they have shown little evidence of being able to think about them in a nuanced and principled way."

"The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world. They attach identity more strongly to every act of online speech than almost any real world situation does. … we have different expectations for the publicness and persistence of a statement depending on a variety of factors. There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don't become part of the searchable Internet. Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. … pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one's real identity. … Let's not pretend that what Google and Facebook are doing has long-established precedents and therefore these companies are only doing what they're doing to mimic real life. They are creating tighter links between people's behavior and their identities than has previously existed in the modern world."

"what I see again and again in the debate about this is two massive straw men: “Anonymity is essential so that the marginalised/endangered can speak”, “Real names are essential to stop bad behaviour” … the voices of the marginalised only have impact when attached to a consistent meatspace identity. The old concept of “you own your own words” from The WELL has a deep and resonant meaning here: words which a real identity visibly stands behind will always carry more impact than those of a completely unknown person. But, more importantly, not every forum is likely to be one where those cases where anonymity is clearly required are likely to speak. … What’s required here, as is often the case, is a granular methodology. Again, I’d refer back to The WELL. On The WELL, your real name was always visible, as part of your profile. This was non-negotiable, as part of the “owning your own words” ethos. And it worked. The exception was for topics which could be seen as sensitive (usually around sexuality, but others too) where you only saw someone’s real name if they explicitly put it in. I’d argue that for a general social network without pre-established forums, that control should rest with the original poster (in this case, me – but if you have a blog, you). OP’s should have the ability to make comments “Real names only” or “anonymity allowed”. In other words, devolve the power."

"I'm always amazed at how this key point [people want "to make certain that they are not judged out of context"] is lost in design decisions about social media: context matters. And that's not just about the identity you use when you're in a particular context, but how the things you do in that context get shared across the network. Facebook's working to flatten identity, which is troublesome not only for vulnerable people (as danah points out), but for varied personal expression across the web."

"The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly. … What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety. If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable. … There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so. Thus, from my perspective, enforcing “real names” policies in online spaces is an abuse of power."

"This page lists groups of people who are disadvantaged by any policy which bans Pseudonymity and requires so-called "Real names" (more properly, legal names). This is an attempt to create a comprehensive list of groups of people who are affected by such policies. The cost to these people can be vast, including: harassment, both online and offline; discrimination in employment, provision of services, etc; actual physical danger of bullying, hate crime; arrest, imprisonment, or execution in some jurisdictions; economic harm such as job loss, loss of professional reputation; social costs of not being able to interact with friends and colleagues; possible (temporary) loss of access to their data if their account is suspended or terminated. The groups of people who use pseudonyms, or want to use pseudonyms, are not a small minority (some of the classes of people who can benefit from pseudonyms constitute up to 50% of the total population, and many of the others are classes of people that almost everyone knows). However, their needs are often ignored by the relatively privileged designers and policy-makers who want people to use their real/legal names."

"Pseudonyms are not in themselves harmful. Yes, they can be used for harm, as when people use them for anonymous, slanderous attacks, trolling, etc., but in the vast majority of cases there is no harm done. Importantly, they can serve to protect vulnerable groups. There’s even a comprehensive list of people harmed by Real Names policies. In the cases where pseudonyms are being abused, it is the harm that should be stopped, not the pseudonyms. To my mind there are three categories of Pseudonymous behavior, and they should be treated differently: AKA or “Also Known As” … Pseudonym … Trolls … “Real identities” have real benefits to users — creating communities of trust, silencing trolls, people standing by their words. Nothing can destroy a happy social space faster than allowing the trolls to go unchecked. The use of real names online has gained momentum in recent years, I think as a consequence of the rise of social networking; in an earlier era this wasn’t the case. But most peoples’ pseudonymous online behavior falls into the first two categories — only the third needs policing. Pseudonyms, which provide so many benefits to the first two categories, should not be banned because of the third."

"The reason online social services are winning the day is because they have served the side of freedom in this ongoing struggle [between Liberty and Authority]. It's this more than anything that makes them so valuable to the human population as a whole. Now that they're growing global in influence and reach, their own mechanisms of self-government must evolve to reflect this. Otherwise they themselves will become the new oppressive regimes."

"There's a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it's possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners, who might be banks, retailers, supermarkets, hospitals, airlines. To connect with your use of cell phones that might be running their mobile operating system. To provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms. Simply put, a real name is worth more than a fake one. That's really what it's about, money. That's why they want you to use their social network, and why they want you to not use Zuck's. Because they want the money. Remember, if you want to understand how corporations work, if you think about money, you're most of the way there."

"the highly limiting nature of this obsession of some fictional “true” self at the expense of identity play both on and offline. The norm that needs changing is not for people to stop playing with identity, as Jarvis argues, but for that playfulness to be better accepted and promoted."

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html. http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/dcdsn.htm

"At Facebook, where I’ve worked on the design of the public commenting widget, the approach is to try to replicate real-world social norms by emphasizing the human qualities of conversation. People’s faces, real names & brief biographies … are placed next to their public comments, to establish a baseline of responsibility. Facebook also encourages you to share your comments with your friends. Though you’re free to opt out, the knowledge that what you say may be seen by the people you know is a big deterrent to trollish behavior. This kind of social pressure works because, at the end of the day, most trolls wouldn’t have the gall to say to another person’s face half the things they anonymously post on the Internet. Instead of waiting around for human nature to change, let’s start to rein in bad behavior by promoting accountability. … lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human."

"“People using their real names are better behaved”, on the other hand strikes me as a straw man... except all the evidence shows that they do behave better. Media UK has been using real names for a number of years now; and the standard of discussion in the discussion areas is considerably higher than equivalent forums (Digital Spy, for example). The quality is now so good, we no longer have to bother with any moderation. As the site's owner, I saw some horrid things going on when we allowed people to hide behind pseudonyms. Thank goodness we no longer do that."

"anonymity isn’t the problem. (Wikipedia seems to have managed pretty well without requiring real names, because it has an effective system of persistent identity.) The problem is that once an online discussion space gets off to a bad start it’s very hard to change the tone. The early days of any online community are formative. The tone set by early participants provides cues for each new arrival. Your site will attract newcomers based on what they find already in place: people chatting amiably about their lives will draw others like themselves; similarly, people engaging in competitive displays of bile will entice other putdown artists to join the fun. … When you opened up comments, was it really about having a conversation with the readers? Then have that conversation! Get the editors and reporters in there mixing it up with the public. Sure, there will be problems and awkward moments; there will also be breakthroughs in understanding."

"Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations. … A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness."

"In the wake of the absolute untracebility of successful connections it's not surprising that a utility like Missed Connections has popped up from folks nexted on Chatroullet. Sample plea: "you had 6 inches of wine left your name is patrick. we were the two cute girls who made you spit up your wine. you showed us your space camp souvenirs and we talked about how amazing canadian healthcare is. don't forget about us!" Most connections on Chatroullet are failures. Few end as the one above. Every new media births its own disease. Email birthed spam. Here the spam are perverts. This is an experiment changing by the day, and it remains to be seen whether the angels prevail or whether perversion overwhelms, and the whole site is nexted. But something interesting is stirring."

"What online communities or networks have embraced or enforced both anonymity and impermanence (i.e. no permanent archives)? Usenet (before Deja), IRC, imageboards (2ch/4chan), Craigslist Missed Connections, Omegle, ChatRoulette... What else?"

"It's impossible to generalize from a group of viewpoints so often in complete disagreement, but the theme of the online world coming to mirror the physical world certainly emerges from the rubble. And with extremists on both sides harping away about the impact of total anonymity online, we sometimes forget that in no other part of our lives can we be completely anonymous."

"Just as the music industry needs to learn that the world of bits requires a different business model, law enforcement and others need to understand that the old ideas of identification don't work on the Internet. For good or for bad, whether you like it or not, there's always going to be anonymity on the Internet."

"GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special "alternative" websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same." http://www.thoughtcrime.org/ & http://www.disruptivestudies.org/

"Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect." >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet, http://www.smartmobs.com/2009/11/29/the-hidden-internet/

Governance in Wikipedia is a confusing but workable mix of consensus (0.5% of users generate 50% of the edits, a little over 500 people -- IMHO, the big scaling and usability issue to be tested), democracy (Vote for Deletion), aristocracy (closer to the statement, "leadership in Wikipedia is knowing where information is) and monarchy (Jimbo as benevolent dictator of all human knowledge, for now). They are "flexible over methodology and value results over process."

"6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help". http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/07/21

"If a citizen journalist, or a blogger, or a witness is only allowed to remain anonymous if published under the protection of an established news organisation, it suggests yet again that courts have some way to go before understanding the full impact of democratised media. Why should the judiciary recognise this when one of our most august news organisations doesn't seem able to either? The curious business of NightJack gives the strong impression that the Times views such publishing efforts as essentially competitive, when they have to be viewed as complementary. A further unintended consequence would be that if, as an anonymous police source, you felt the need to unburden yourself about some aspect of the force, turn into a whistleblower even, then where would you turn? How safe would you feel about your identity being protected if it were put in the hands of a publisher which apparently thinks it is in the public interest for anonymous writers, sources and citizens to be exposed?"

"Today's ruling, believed to be the first on the privacy rights of internet bloggers, confirms that a desire to remain anonymous is insufficient to be enforced by law."

""investigative reporting is desperately threatened by what this government is doing. I've been thinking a long time about how to stay one step ahead of the game," says the Brighton-based investigative journalist Duncan Campbell ... "The good news is that the surveillance methods that would close down what we do are still one step away. This isn't the one that does the real harm." That will come, Campbell thinks, when the police put all sorts of information - vehicle licence plates' movements, emails, phone calls - into a real-time system that anyone can access"; "The concern is that if someone gets in touch with a journalist, who then writes a story based on that information, the new regulations mean that the police - or intelligence services or local council - can work back from the database of all the contacts made to the journalist & figure out who the whistleblower is"; ""anybody who imagines that electronic communications are secure is crazy.""

"Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person. ... anonymous environments create the environments in which Godwin’s and Harris’ Laws apply." via http://www.caterina.net/archive/001170.html

"Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users & their relationships with advertisers, application developers, & data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization ... We present a framework for analyzing privacy & anonymity in social networks & develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter ... & Flickr ... can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate. Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy “sybil” nodes, is robust to noise & all existing defenses, & works even when the overlap between the target network & the adversary’s auxiliary information is small."

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/2007_Circumvention_Landscape_Report: "The report was completed in 2007 and released to a group of private sponsors. Many of the findings of the report are now out of date, but we present them now, as is, because we think that the broad conclusions of the report about these tools remain valid and because we hope that other researchers will benefit from access to the methods used to test the tools."

"Justice Stevens said "quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent." Stevens concluded "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. "" via Jeff Jarvis, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/01/02/identity-and-anonymity/ : "I have long said here that I give more credence and value to the opinions of those who stand by those opinions with their names, as I do here. But there is a place for anonymity in political discourse (and in whistleblowing and under repressive regimes)."

"2009 is going to be all about social network identity and spreading it out around the web. MySpace, Facebook and Google all want users to log in to third party sites using their account credentials from those sites, and having those accounts be associated with real names to do it is a competitive advantage. Facebook has a big head start on that already with Facebook Connect, which is now available to any third party site that wants to use it. Google also has its product out the door, and is integrating with sites like Twitter. MySpace is working to get MySpaceID (formerly Data Availability) out to partners."

"The debate goes back almost two years, if not longer. In March 2007, Google said it would anonymize search records after 24 months to protect privacy, then followed that up a couple months later by agreeing to anonymize the date after 18 months. Just three months ago, with both the US and EU breathing down Google’s neck, the company said it would cut its data retention time down to nine months. But in April of this year, a European Commission advisory panel recommended that the major search engines delete search data after six months. Microsoft’s Live Search currently stores that data for 18 months, while Google and Yahoo store web search records for nine and 13 months, respectively."

"A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online."

"Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation & to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, & blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior & encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior & misbehave themselves. ... they're discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether. Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn't paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions"

"In 1787, when America's framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right. And yet, on the supposedly Wild West frontier of the Internet, publishing anonymously is not so easy. ... The amazing Tor project lets you use the Internet anonymously ... it also allows for anonymous publishing ... Unfortunately, you need the Tor software to visit anonymously-published sites, but we realized there's no reason this need be so. So I dusted off some work I'd begun years and years ago and build a tor2web proxy. Now anyone with a web browser can visit an anonymous Tor ... from any Web browser, without any special software ... publishing an anonymous website is now also fairly easy". http://www.torproject.org/hidden-services.html

"Tor allows clients and relays to offer hidden services. That is, you can offer a web server, SSH server, etc., without revealing your IP address to its users. In fact, because you don't use any public address, you can run a hidden service from behind your firewall. " See http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2008/08/11/gmail-down-p2p-dns/

"Online games & communities can be fantastic "potential spaces" or "holding environments" for collective creativity, but they can also be territories where aggressive fantasies can be acted out without fear of consequences", "anonymity of online personae"

The Village Voice, December 21, 1993, pp36–42

review of 'Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature' by John Mullan

"in the age of wholesale surveillance, where everyone collects data on us all the time, anonymization is very fragile and riskier than it initially seems."

"Anonymity, privacy, and security are intertwined; you can't just separate them out like that. And privacy isn't opposed to security; privacy is part of security. And the value of privacy in a free society is enormous."

""if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that's the law - the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else""

"search ... through Googlonymous, it is Googlonymous that goes on Google & does the search for you, the only ip address that Google will see is the ip address of the server of Googlonymous. Googlonymous does not keep any record who searched for what"

"use to organize all your proxies. You can add, edit and remove them from a single master list"; people "use anonymizers to shield their IP address & protect themselves from hackers, online tracking, harvesting & other website snooping techniques"

"A final thought on anonymity: If you don’t really need to be anonymous, don’t be. … But some people are going to need to be anonymous, and that’s why this guide exists. Just please don’t use these techniques unless you really need to."

"Try Torpark; its small, portable, clean, open-source, free of spyware/adware, and free"

We are in the process of inventing the types of selves and societies that inhabit this public space. Because these are selves, the nuances and subtleties are as great as humans can manage. Nothing is simple."

"Run Torpark.exe and it will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously. How much does Torpark cost? IT'S FREE."

"you can take steps to protect yourself online. Beneath the fold, we've listed some tips and tools that will help keep your search history private"

"first commercial example of a darknet, a virtual network set up to share files between trusted users. The service is endorsed by political group the Pirate Party which is running for election in Sweden under a banner to reform the country's copyright law

"# First and last name # Valid city, state, and zip code # Telephone number with area code/prefix that match the generated city # Mother’s maiden name # Birthday"

"the exclusive identity model should be a source of terror"