You want to know the best way of remaining relatively anon on the internets? Buy a cheap laptop off of CL (and not using your home computer or real email addy, duh) and yank out the hard drive. Grab a couple of USB sticks, one containing a copy of Ubuntu Live or other non-BSD linux build such a Knoppix, and another to be used as an encrypted storage container. Boot your OS using the first stick, and store files on the other. Only use publicly accessible wifi hotspots, and run a MAC address spoofer that allows you to change the MAC address of your wireless NIC every time you connect to a wifi hotspot. Don't use the same hotspot very often. Run TOR and switch identities between every site you visit. Commercial VPN's are not to be trusted. If you are especially paranoid, you can find more info here: Network Forensics Evasion.

However, unless you are a terrorist or a CP trader, I wouldn't be overly concerned with such things. Common sense practices are best. Just don't get yourself involved in any shit that can really get you in trouble, or cause you to become so paranoid that you think the preceding steps are necessary to cover your tracks.

The More You Know★

It's either that or https://startpage.com

My favorite scroogle.org is dead :(

www.ixquick.com

I use it, have for a year-or-so; behind a VPN for good measure, even though it vetted well. I suppose they both might be secret government partners, but what can one do; if you eschew the internet altogether, they still win.

they've got you (and all of us) at the isp level most likely anyway.

I work for an ISP and while I can't speak for all others, I can attest that ours does not have any secret spying rooms or conduct deep packet inspections. If this where being done, it would not be at the ISP level, but rather all internet traffic would be copied directly from the backbones via fiber optic cables to massive data mining installations, much like the one being constructed in Utah.

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003, and exposed in 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Look around a little more ;)

Oh, I am well aware that some ISP's do, I just happen to know for a fact that the one I work for does not. I know every inch of that building and can see all packets exiting and entering our network (although I do not deep inspect said packets, I would see data leakage if it were being copied and funneled out).

yes this is what i was referring to and that was yearrrs ago.

Duck Duck Go makes for a great portal to the internet for simple searches, and can even come in handy as an address bar search engine with the shortcuts they offer.

I have no problem using Duck Duck Go over Google for every day use, but I still use Google for deep internet queries.

A couple weeks ago some one posted a thread in /r/conspiracy asking about Duck Duck Go...here is what I posted:

To be honest it really doesn't matter which search engine that you use. All telecommunication traffic (and I do mean all) can be subject to capture by governments, the intelligence community, corporations, or even a properly motivated individual regardless of whatever steps you take. At the time of my post there is simply no alternative to this fact. I know it sucks, and I wish things were different but that's the world we all live in...at least for now.

Telecoomunication traffic may be monitored, but I doubt that all telecommunication traffic is recorded. That would take crazy resources (they're apparently building the mother of all data centers in Utah so maybe they can record, but I still doubt it). And even if is was recorded, they'd need filtering logic to make sense of it.

Google records your information and likely has domain-specific ways of filtering it. This makes them way more useful to the state for when the state wants to know everyone about you. So using something like Duck Duck Go makes sense.

If you want to be extra cautious, use Duck Duck Go from Tor or some other anonymizer (realizing that even Tor isn't a silver bullet: the state likely runs plenty of Tor nodes).

At this point, I can tell you (since I'm not using my real name) that virtually all telcom traffic is indeed recorded. This is what I do for a living.

Internet traffic (especially overseas traffic) has been being tapped and stored for years. If you research the AT&T Folsom Street Incident this is precisely what they were doing--they were tapping the Internet right at the fiber switch. Years ago.

Telephone traffic is a bit different. AFAIK voice traffic is NOT being recorded (yet--it will be once the new NSA center in Utah is online) but text messages are stored.

This is being done even lower down than the ISP level--this is being done at the backbone level. There is no getting around it.

Use a VPN, encrypt everything.

Oh yeah, came here to say that I like the idea of DDG--it just sucks, unfortunately. I use "darkle"--it's great on tablets. If you want to search a lot it pretty much doubles my battery life..just like RES "dark mode" does!

This is my field as well (work SSL for an ISP), and I maintain that commercial VPN's cannot and should never be trusted. One's best bet is to take the route I've posted here. But being a pronoid myself, I find all of it unnecessary and futile. Or perhaps it's the nihilist in me that just doesn't give a fuck, take your pick.

Haha, that is precisely what I'm doing also!!

Seems that you know what you are talking about my friend. Only problem with running Ubuntu from a live filesystem stick, of course, is that it is SLOW. I only work from the command line though so it doesn't bother me.

Thanks for posting that for others though...it is GREAT advice. I owned a pretty large regional ISP and I now do the same thing.

Thanks for the info. Pretty sobering that they can do that at the backbone level. Christ.

What kind of storage technology is being used for that? I would think that the volume of information would make conventional storage tech impractical. I suppose there may be classified storage tech that trumps what's available on the market.

I disagree, I believe all telecommunications can and is being copied, and the Utah facility is only on the fast track because of IPv6 moving quickly ahead. They need that extra storage space to monitor and record data from all those additional IP addresses that will be rolled out.

Frightening. If they can record all telecommunications in a manner that they can then data mine, that seems to me to be the ultimate instrument of social control. They will have all the business intelligence and all the dirt needed to maintain the economic supremacy of insiders.

not everything is recorded right now, just anything with a keyword. once the utah data-mine/ai apocalypse comes online EVERYTHING worldwide will be recorded, analyzed, linked and cross-referenced from shopping to banking to emails, texts, im, phonecalls, social circles and movements. aka 1984

probably a mirror of the entire internet too, enabling a 'memory-hole' and history 'revision'.

I used Starting Page for a little while, never liked Duck Duck Go.

I use duckduckgo.com or startpage.com.

I suspect that all search engines are involved in covert censorship because of our inherently oliglopolistic economy. I have a subreddit about search engine censorship which is at http://www.reddit.com/r/googlecensorship

Even Bing is a better option than Google at this point.

Disagree, strongly. At least Google fights the govt requests, and posts stats on them and content removal requests. Certain others just roll over. Other than Google, Twitter is the only company I can think of that actively and publicly fights back.

Google is big enough to fight back...but don't think there's no censorship going on there!!

YouTube (owned by Google of course) is a complete joke. They won't take down this famous Muslim-annoying video...but just try to post one video on, say, holocaust revisionism. Your entire account will be suspended within a day for "hate speech" and the video removed.

Like everything else in this country they are Israeli-owned. I am still waiting for the day when people wake up and realized that Israel "annexed" the United States...and we are ALL Palestinians now.

[deleted]

how hard did it make you clench? did you pull a muscle?

The comparison between the two appears to be like stifling a turd.

If you have javascript enabled using Chrome then copying links from google search results pages will also carry with it a tracking token.

Google uses these to 'improve quality of its search results'.

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003, and exposed in 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Look around a little more ;)