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Dissidents Seeking Anonymous Web Solutions?
DocMurphy asks: "I'm working with some dissidents who are looking for ways to use the Internet from within repressive regimes. Many have in-home Internet access, but think it too risky to participate in pro-freedom activities on home PCs. Internet cafés are also available, but although fairly anonymous, every machine may be infected with keystroke loggers that give governments access to and knowledge of 'banned' sites. Dissidents not only want to remain anonymous themselves, but also wish to not compromise the sites they access. Any suggestions for products/procedures/systems out there making anonymous access & publishing a reality under repressive regime run Internet access?"
write it in advance, take it to the cybercafe on a floppy, pgp it, email it to someone you trust (or an automated publisher)
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
http://tor.eff.org/
PeaceFire distributes a free program called the Circumventor which can be used (by running it on a server in a free country) to safely and securely proxy out of a firewalled nation like China.
Jason.
Between IP-Addresses, MAC addresses, and dial-in-numbers, there is no anonymity on the internet. Any feeling of anonymity is an illusion. Best not to risk your life if a regime is that oppressive. Not even encryption is safe, because as you mentioned, keyloggers and silent listeners can capture passcodes and keys. If you must pass information, try it the old fashioned way - person to person or with a trusted intermediary.
Even better:
1. Have a PC with a CDROM drive.
2. Rent or borrow an SSH account outside the country.
3. Boot PC using KNOPPIX (do not load hard drive)
4. Open a connection through SSH that forwards a local to an anonymous proxy at the far end.
5. Use 127.0.0.1 as your proxy address.
6. Surf away!
When done (or if the government busts in!), reboot your computer - no traces left. (Knoppix stores everything in RAM).
Keyloggers do not work against you, because you are booting from known media. (On the other hand, if the NSA REALLY wants you, they will hack your bios - but no one else is probably that anal).
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
No, not quite.
A dissident (my definition, anyway) expresses dissent by speaking, writing, or other nonviolent activity.
A terrorist expresses dissent by violence, mayhem, murder, or destruction of property.
All you need to do is tunnel a local port over the ssh connection to a remote proxy.
For example, you could forward local port 8888 to a remote SOCKS server (port 1080 is SOCKS) like so:
ssh -L 8888:some-anon-proxy.com:1080 ssh-user@ssh-host
That forwards port 8888 on your machine to some-anon-proxy.com port 1080 via the ssh tunnel.
Then set your browser to use localhost port 8888 as the SOCKS proxy.
Note that most SOCKS connections still do DNS from your local machine so you need to protect that by some method. To do that you either need to use SOCKS 4a (I think), use a non-SOCKS proxy (like HTTP proxy), or use a local proxy like privoxy that itself fowards to another proxy via the SSH tunnel.
And there is always Tor.
The command is:
ssh -L proxyport:proxyIP:proxyport sshServerIP
for example:
ssh -L 8000:lvsweb.lasvegasstock.com:8000 shell.frogstar.com
Note that this is not untraceable - especially by the NSA. But other governments will have a difficult time with it.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
> There are many posters on fark.com who tell of farkers getting
> intimidation visits from teh Secret Police
Yo, cornholio. This IS Fark, right? And you believe anything written there? Yea, right. All the zaniness of the Moveon.org crowd without the maturity. And that is saying something. Hint: don't lieten to what the tinfoil hat crowd says, they ain't sane. Not saying that the Secret Service doesn't at least keep an eye on even low threat sites like Fark, but I seriously doubt they would waste their limited manpower harassing a random leftist posting "death to Bush" threats there unless they had their profile linked with accounts on more seriously dangerous sites.
And besides, death threats against a President should be taken seriously, and shouldn't be protected by the 1st Amendment. It isn't like the odds of surviving being elected President of the US isn't already worse than being shot into space, lets not make em worse by inventing a constituitional right to make death threats against the poor bastards.
Lets review recent history, shall we? (Warning, flamebait)
Bush II: The Deaniacs are this >< close to launching suicide bombers against him. I'd be shocked if he makes it to the end of his term without somebody taking a shot. And depending on where that last airliner was bound and whether they knew he wasn't home at the time you could say Osama already give it a go.
Clinton: Somebody crashed a fscking airplane INTO THE WHITE HOUSE. Of course he left a trail of blood in his own minions. (Ron Brown, et al.)
Bush I: Ok, so nobody tried to kill him until he left office.
Reagan: Blamo. But they just don't make crazed gunmen like they used and he didn't succeed. For which the world should give thanks, otherise half the world would still be under the darkness of Soviet Communism.
Carter: I seem to recall a nutjob taking a run at him. Or was it Ford.
Ford: See above.
Nixon: Nobody tried to shoot him. Nobody even really wanted to, except some of John Kerry's more extreme friends. Which says volumes about how far public civility has sunk in the interveening time.
Johnson: Well he probably assumed by office by assination, but that doesn't count, does it?
Kennedy: Blamo. See above.
Democrat delenda est
Knoppix stores everything in RAM
Not entirely true. Knoppix searches for and uses existing unix swap partitions. To stop it doing this you should pass the 'noswap' option at boot. Look at the Knoppix Cheat Codes page for evidence, and for other boot options.
One good turn - gets all the covers.