UPLOAD

Make Yourself

Invisible

Anyone can now acquire a bulletproof, anonymous online identity. By Publius

In May of this year, a judge ordered Facebook to turn over the identity of someone who created a fake profile of a high school official. Other school officials have sued over fake MySpace profiles. Not all judges take free speech rights seriously; even fewer high school and university administrators do. Setting up an anonymous blog or website is the obvious way to protect yourself from being punished for speaking out, but is this legitimate? And if so, how can you accomplish it?

Anonymous speech has a long and distinguished history. It was part of the political debate leading to the rift with Great Britain; revolutionaries relied on it to conceal their identities from the Crown.

The tradition continued with the Federalist Papers, which presented arguments for ratifying the U.S. Constitution. They were published in the 1780s under pseudonyms including “Publius.” The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers, who predicted that the Constitution would lead to a tyrannical central government, used aliases including “Federal Farmer.”

Internet anonymity is something of a high-wire tightrope act: one tiny technological misstep, and you’re doomed. Fortunately, technologies for anonymous website publishing are both secure and, finally, easy to use.

You can create an anonymous or pseudonymous persona that’s proof against not just random busybodies, but attorneys armed with subpoenas too. (You should be familiar with relevant state and federal laws, of course, and do nothing illegal.)

98 Make: Volume 15

Today, online anonymity works by cloaking your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, which can be traced back to you in some circumstances. One way to cloak your IP address is to use someone else’s, such as a local coffee shop, corporation, or neighborhood home with an open wi-fi connection. But that’s not terribly convenient, and a business may not be delighted to find out what you’re doing (even if an open access point was their mistake).

A better solution is free software named Tor that lets you connect to a sophisticated network of anonymizing servers, meaning your IP address will appear to be the address of a Tor server, not your own. Messages are encrypted and forwarded randomly through the Tor network before they reach their destination.

At the cost of some speed, this arrangement provides pretty good privacy protection — there are no absolute guarantees — against attempts to unearth the identity of who’s behind an email address or website.

Illustration by Julian Honoré/ p4rse.com