Anonymizer just released the results of a new survey of people’s use of privacy protecting technologies. The short answer is that the old standards, anti-virus and firewalls, are widely used. Unfortunately they don’t actually do much to protect your privacy. They are more about security.

For full details, read the article.

There has been a lot of attention recently to the arrest of an alleged LulzSec hacker after his anonymity was compromised by the anonymity service he was using, HideMyAss.com. Some articles on the event are here, here and the provider’s explanation here.

The reason this company was able to compromise the privacy of their user was that they had logs of user activity. They know what IP address is assigned to each user and can use that to attribute any activity back to the real identity of the person behind the account.

The real problem with logs is that they exist or they don’t. You can’t keep logs only for “bad users” but not for responsible “good users” because even if it was possible to identify them as such in advance, you would not find anything like agreement about who should fall in which category.

Many operators of privacy services, including myself, feel very strongly that such tools should be usable in countries like China to circumvent the censorship and surveillance there. Such actions are certainly illegal for the user, and probably for the provider. While being a UK company and only responding to UK court orders, they were “forced” to expose the identity of a person in the US who was then arrested by the FBI.

I don’t know enough about this case to debate whether or not this person is guilty or deserved to be arrested. My concern is that this case has demonstrated that anyone who can cause a UK court order to be severed against this company can expose their users. It also makes them a target for hacking, social engineering, infiltration and other attacks which could gain access to these logs without a UK court order.

As a general rule, if information exists and people want it, there is a very good chance it will escape, if only by accident.

Perhaps we should not be too surprised that this company failed to protect its users, when it has no visible privacy policy on the website, and there are no identifiable people standing behind the product and brand with their personal reputations.

I founded this company, Anonymizer.com, and I personally stand behind our services. We have clear privacy policies, we keep no logs of the surfing activities of our users, we have no way of identifying what user may have visited what website. We have an unblemished record of providing robust privacy since 1995.

As I have said in many previous posts, it all comes down to trust. If you don’t know who is providing the service, and don’t have the ability to research their history and gauge their integrity, you should not use that service.

Randi Zuckerberg, marketing director and co-founder of Facebook said:

I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away… People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.

<irony> This of course explains why no one is a jerk or a bully on Facebook. </irony>

I have been doing this Anonymity thing for much longer than Facebook has existed. I have seen the debates and watched the reality. I am convinced that the problem is that most Internet spaces are impersonal, rather than that they are anonymous. People will be outrageously rude and offensive online while being unfailingly courteous in person, even if both situations are in real name.

In reality, most “real world” interactions are functionally anonymous, yet most of us behave most of the time.

I won’t even get in to how terrible her idea would be for people under repressive regimes.

Facebook: “Anonymity on the Internet has to go away” | ZDNet

This article in Scientific American does a nice job of describing why it is difficult to track attacks back to their true origins.

This essay by Bruce Schneier goes farther arguing that it is fundamentally impossible to create an Internet without anonymity.

The core point of both articles is that identifying the computer that a given packet came from is not the same as identifying the sender. The computer could be a server set up to enable anonymous communications (like Anonymizer.com), it could be a compromised computer (like part of a botnet), or even a server run by the attacker purchased using pre-paid or stolen credit cards.

Whatever the mechanism, it will always be possible for attackers to hide their identities and activities. The real question is the degree to which we are willing to design the Internet to make tracking and monitoring of citizens easy for repressive regimes.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier for linking to this interesting article on using patterns in language to identify the author of emails.

While the technique would not allow them to identify your anonymous emails in an ocean of others, that is rarely the real world threat scenario.

In many cases there is a relative hand full of likely authors of a given email or group of emails. It is often possible to gather large samples of emails known and acknowledged to be from the likely authors. In that case this technique has a small group of targets and excellent training materials which allow for very high levels of accuracy (the authors of the paper claim 80% – 90%). That is probably enough to get a warrant to search your home and computers.

Unless you have been unusually careful, the gig is probably up by then. Remember, this might not be for criminal matters. It many cases this would come up in whistle blowing or other non-criminal situations.