Anonymity

Every operation made in cyber space, every visited web site, and every web service accessed, leave traces of the user’s experience on the Internet. This information is considered very precious for commercial and intelligence purposes. Private companies and governments are constantly monitoring the World Wide Web to collect and correlate the information to use in analysis on the user’s behavior.

Surveillance and monitoring are activities of primary interest for many governments that in many cases trace political opponents with dramatic consequences that flow in fierce persecution. Recently the demand of anonymity has increased, mainly to respond to the large diffusion of surveillance platforms deployed all over the world, but the concept of anonymity induces fear in our imaginations due to the direct link that is usually made to illicit activities. It must be considered that anonymity on the web could also be motivated by noble argumentations, such as the fight for the human right to liberty of expression, avoidance of censorship, liberal promotion and the circulation of thought.

Anonymous communications have an important role in our political and social discourse. Individuals desire to hide their identities because they may be concerned about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives.

Surveillance apparatus exist, that can track the location of hundreds of millions of people, collect the phone records of entire nations, and tap into the very backbone of the internet.

Every day, the agencies records the lives of millions of Americans and countless foreigners, collecting massive amounts of information about who they know, where they’ve been, and what they’ve done. Its surveillance programs have been kept secret from the public they allegedly serve and protect.

Many internet users are aware of the risks when signing up to services provided by companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have the ability to store data. Some may even know that cellphone carriers store all text (SMS) messages sent.

The awareness has been raised thanks to Wikileaks, the SOPA bill, firewalls in countries like China and now western countries (Australia and New Zealand have had firewalls for quite a while), and country-specific legislation which enables rights holders to request ISPs disconnect their customers with little proof of copyright infringement.

But when you talk with friends or family about this, quite often response is “I’ve got nothing to hide” or “I’m not special.” Of course, you may not be special now, but who knows what might be considered “special” in the future?

It does not take much to accidentally stumble across something you should not on the web, log files are stored with ISPs and cloud services that don’t have an expiry date. It is easy for governments to cherry pick information that is been collated through no fault of your own, and construct a story that fits their interest.

Every log file stored around the world will tell a story about you.

In the Internet, every machine is identified by its IP address that could be hidden by using anonymizing services and networks such as I2P and Tor network. Usually the anonymizing process is based on the concept of distribution of routing information. During the transmission of data between two entities in a network it is impossible to know the path between source and destination. Every node of the network manages minimal information to route the packets to the next hop without conserving history on the path. To avoid interception, encryption algorithms are used to make wiretapping impossible and to disable the recomposition of the original messages.