Ubiquitous Anonymity

by tristero

This New York Times article on Internet privacy inspired the thought that one good way to protest at least some of the behavior of an American government acting like a third rate Stalinist satellite is to make anonymous websurfing the standard.

As you probably know, Google is locked in a fight to turn over their users’ identification data to George W. Bush, ostensibly so Bush can stamp out illegal forms of pornography“establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors” . If you believe that they’re not seeking individual records of searches, there’s a Playboy centerfold of Phyllis Schafly I’d like to sell you (and I’ll throw in a free rubber ducky). Those who object to this blatant Big Brotherism are met with the fallacious accusation that they are in favor of young kids being exposed to pornography and with the equally fallacious fascist threat that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

You don’t like George Bush having the opportunity to spy on you? Make yourself invisible, even when you surf for groceries. That way, simply using anonymity software will not be considered suspicious in itself – hey, I forgot to turn it off! And obviously, the more people who use anonymity software, the less suspicious its use by any one person.

So, here are a few Mac OSX programs to get started (the Times article has links to some PC programs). It’s probably a good idea even if you don’t want to use them now to download them anyway. Given this administration’s proclivities, there’s no telling how long anonymity software will be available.

You might ask: How good is this stuff? Does George Bush have a backdoor into these programs or their techniques, rendering them useless against a malicious US administration? Are they difficult to set up and use? Do they slow down web surfing and emailing?I don’t know. I’ve been told that PGP is exactly what it says it is: pretty good privacy, meaning it takes a very sophisticated computer program a considerable amount of time to decrpyt. The others are new to me so if anyone has any info please drop a note in the comments.

ANONYMITY SOFTWARE: MAC OSX

GPGMail 1.1.1 – PGP For Apple Mail
Caem (OS X)
Java Anonymous Proxy X 1.037
Proxify
Easy ways to access Proxify
NetShade
Tor

[Update: Link added to TOR. Link added to clarify the law at the center of the issue. Fallacious accusation #1 was corrected and changed in response to reader comments.]