Comments on: Question from a long time customer

By: lance

lance — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:57:39 +0000

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.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:56:38 +0000

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.

By: lance

lance — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:28:16 +0000

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.

By: Privacy Law

Privacy Law — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:37:14 +0000

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.

By: lance

lance — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:56:47 +0000

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.

By: lance

lance — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:53:15 +0000

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.

By: Ann H

Ann H — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:03:03 +0000

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!

By: al

al — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:43:00 +0000

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?

By: lance

lance — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:57:37 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:05:45 +0000

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?