Question from a long time customer
A long time customer recently sent in the following question. Since it should be of broad interest, I asked his permission to anonymous post and answer it here.
How do you know that subscribing to an anonymizer does not simply mark you for observation?
We all know the NSA is capable of intercepting any electronic communication, and with gajillions of electronic communications happening every second, how would the NSA (or the FBI or the CIA or whoever it is who watches us) know which of those communications to watch?
Seems like the people wanting anonymity would be the first on the list.
Surely they COULD, couldn’t they? That is, get the subscriber lists, which would enable them to intercept communications this side of the proxy - i.e., intercept on the way out, on the way TO the proxy, BEFORE it gets securely tunneled? And no, that would not be possible with the web, but it would with email. Supposedly.
This is what has been proposed to me. What do you think? Does it have any validity?
It is certainly the case that the government could, in principle, monitor your access to privacy services. As long as that access is over a strongly encrypted connection, the contents of your communication, what sites you are visiting or who you are communicating with would be protected. The strength of your anonymity is then largely determined by the number of other users of the same service with which your traffic is being mixed.
In the United States, the use of privacy tools is not restricted. Strict separation of intelligence from law enforcement functions should prevent drift net monitoring of your use of Anonymizer from leading to any kind of legal investigation. The huge number of Anonymizer subscribers would also make this difficult and highly visible.
Outside of the US it is another story. Many countries exercise much greater control over the Internet. Even if it were not blocked by the Iranian government, accessing the Anonymizer website from within Iran would be a risky activity. Once again, the key here is safety in numbers. We have run anti-censorship tools in Iran that supported over 100,000 users. With those numbers, it is awkward for the government to go after people simply for using the service. This is not to say that if you are already under observation for some other reason that it would not give them added ammunition. Privacy tools are generally very effective at keeping you below the radar, but can be much less effective once you are on the radar for whatever reason.
The reality is that there is no evidence of widespread Internet surveillance being used in the US to track users of privacy services. As long as the connection to the service is well encrypted, you should be fine.
- Lance Cottrell
September 29th, 2009 at 1:05 am
An old friend in the government once told me she had to continually change her proxies and encryption. Is that surprising? Also, I’ve run Windows Command “netstat” and everytime my MAC address resets, a new callsign is placed beside my IP Address. Example, “archangel@anonymizer.com/archangel:ssh” or flubber@anonymizer.com/flubber:ssh” is this normal behavior from TNS?
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 am
Yes this is normal. There are several servers supporting TNS. They are load balanced. “archangel” and “flubber” are the names of two of the servers. When you reset your connection, you are randomly assigned to a different server.
January 7th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Isn’t Anonymizer providing anonymization services to/for LEO and LEA? There’s a level of trust the customer must have with the service provider. Otherwise paranoia about law enforcement or intel types getting data straight from the provider (in this case, Anonymizer.com)…data that should be hidden would be 100% revealed.
How you address that trust level? Not saying that Anonymizer clients are criminals…just that privacy should be 100% private. Not private from _mostly_ everyone.
Also, in cases of subpoena/discovery, what is Anonymizer’s official policy for notification? Does the end-user get notified, or is it handled like a wire-tap?
January 8th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
I would think that at least in the U.S. the government would only flag messages when they raise red flags about high profile illegal activities, especially terrorism.
Some people are concerned that every single private email they send gets read by someone. That would be impossible because they just don’t have the manpower to read everyones emails!
January 8th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
Anonymizer keeps no records of web surfing activities, so we are unable to provide anything if served with a subpoena. No one has ever tried to force us to start keeping logs, and we would absolutely fight that.
We do provide privacy services for law enforcement customers, but that does not give them any special access to our other customers. I believe that law enforcement needs privacy when going after the bad guys (who are very much real). That in no way diminishes my passions about personal privacy. I see no contradiction there.
You are absolutely right. There is no such thing as “kind of private”. We provide complete privacy because there is no other legitimate kind.
January 8th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
Certainly there are practical as well as legal impediments to reading everyone’s email, but technology is capable of automatically scanning stupendous amounts of information in real time. I don’t know what the reality is, but if the messages of US citizens were routinely intercepted and used against them, there would be no way to keep it quiet.
I embrace paranoia, but stop short of conspiracy theory.
January 25th, 2010 at 7:37 am
Beginning in 2003, the FBI routinely circumvented and often violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in making requests to telephone service providers for call records. Question is what that means for services such as anonymizer.
January 25th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Many of these violations seem to have been enabled by the cooperation of the phone companies. Anonymizer would require full documentation and compliance before responding in any way to such an order. The key then is that we keep no logs in any case. We could not say who visited a given website on a given day, even if we wanted to. We have received legal process in the past, but have never in any way compromised the privacy of a user’s web activities.
Nyms is a bit different because we actually have a database connecting the user’s account to all the alias email addresses (Nyms). We do this because we have to for the service to work. We do not keep any content at all.
We have never been asked or pressured to change our policies on logging or other information capture.
February 10th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Anonymizer is owned by high tech Abraxas who support the intelligence community. Hmmm? From descriptions on their site, Abraxas is one who does the red flagging.
February 11th, 2010 at 6:57 am
I don’t think Abraxas has any activity in that area, but in any case, they don’t have any ability to do special monitoring of Anonymizer. Our servers are still at the same independent data center where they have been for years.