Hacker Convention Focuses on Privacy
L A S V E G A S, July 29 -- Ever want to walk away from your life?
You can change your identity, hide your tracks on the Internet, and cloak your e-mail in privacy. Battered wives can elude their painful pasts; harassers and criminals can hide from the law. But you probably can’t escape your boss.
Speakers at Defcon, the world’s largest convention of hackers and hangers-on, have privacy on their minds this year. And it’s not just to hide nefarious deeds — although a few of them admit to such motives. Rather, it’s to hide from bosses who may be reading your e-mail, from junk mailers who spam your doorstep, or from bad credit records that may dog you for years.
“America has become a surveillance society,” said John Q. Newman, author of more than a dozen books on personal privacy. “But we can still carve out a zone of privacy for ourselves.”
Needless to say, “John Q. Newman” isn’t the name his mother gave him.
Anonymous Remailers and Such
Most e-mail is traceable. Truly anonymous e-mail isn’t.
Early in the history of the Internet, an “anonymous” remailer in Finland offered e-mailers with something to hide a place to go. The remailer was used by whistle blowers to complain about their bosses, by in-the-closet homosexuals to explore their lifestyles, and by privacy-aware individuals who simply didn’t want their letters traced to their names.
It was also used by spammers and harassers to flood the Internet with sludge, leading to the site’s shutdown.
But several remailers still exist, said “noise,” a law student who runs the “noisebox” anonymous remailer. They’re struggling but thriving, still faced with the problem of being used both for good and for evil.
The systems are simple to use: just e-mail one of their special addresses to get your mail anonymized.
ZeroKnowledge Systems of Montreal goes further. Their product, Freedom, provides a full Internet front-end, which establishes various pseudonyms under which you can surf the Net without leaking personal data. Different pseudonyms, for instance, could be used for socializing, for shopping, and for seeking information, making it impossible for the government or hackers to track your travels through the Net.
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