Anonymous Living

Random open WIFI networks and pay pr use public WIFIs at cafés and such are great if you have a laptop computer. But can you trust them? Are they perhaps subject to surveillance? How do you know if an adversary or anyone else for that matter are watching your traffic?

Encrypt pass your local adversary

The Google Scraper Scroogle.org are now offering their SSL version under the slogan “(coffee shop WiFi entrance)”. This is great if you just want to hide which search-terms you are submitting to Google via Scroogle from someone who is watching you locally, but there’s a catch:

They know that you’re connected to Scroogle using a HTTPS connection. It is encrypted, but it’s there in plain sites, everyone can see that you’re sending a few bytes thisway and getting sligktly more back thatway and it’s plain obvious that you’ve search for something. It is still easy to profile you and classify you as “the terrorist” by doing traffic analysis of your activities on the Internet even if all the sites you visit are visited using https. Big Brother will just say “We know you’re viewing a lot of pages on all these subversive websites. We don’t know what you are looking at there since you are viewing them using https, but we don’t care, we know all these sites are subversive and we don’t care exactly what subversive activity you are interested in).

Tor is a better solution when you’re at a public cafe. Or using some random WIFI you stumbled upon. It will encrypt your traffic through the wifi, through three random Tor-servers and comes out at some random Tor exit node and goes to the website you are interested in. The only catch is that you can’t submit plaintext login information over Tor since you should assume that all Tor-traffic is eavesdropped (which isn’t near as upsetting as it sounds, all someone watching what goes out of a Tor exit node sees is that “some guy who came through the Tor-network fetched some website”).

Good for non-wifi cafés too.

One last detail: You probably want to buy one of those really cheap 1 GB USB memory sticks and put a Linux distribution which includes Tor or something like that on it. You’ll find that real handy if you come accross an Internet café without a WIFI, in which case you have to use their desktop computers).