The Jaime-Thomas Rassert trial, the Pirate Bay convictions, PATRIOT and FISA, and a string of other outrageous miscarriages of justice have made it apparent to a growing number of people that the stakes are increasing in the fight for privacy and free information. We are going to win because we are on the side of natural justice, but we can reduce our casualties until we do. To do that, FreeMeme presents a guide to anonymizing your online presence, and hiding your files behind a thick wall of deniable encryption that will be difficult for even government intelligence agencies to break.

Target Audience

This guide is targeted at novice to intermediate computer users who are intelligent and capable of independent thought. You don’t need a lot of technical skill but you do need to have a brain and like using it. We’re not going to use pictures for fear of giving away our own identity/ies, so you’re gonna need to make an attempt at literacy, but please, feel free to ask for clarification. We are nerds, we don’t always notice when we’re using jargon or being too technical; if you are making an honest effort to understand, that makes us happy and helps us improve the guide. This is not a guide for real criminals who do Bad Things. If you break laws that put the full force of angry governments after you, you are fucked and we do not want to help you. This is also not a guide for script kiddies. If you think you’re a “computer hacker” and you’re reading security guides on the web, first learn what hacker actually means, and second, please, kill yourself.

Caveats

Before we get started, there are some things you need to understand. First, there is no such thing as perfect security, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either stupid or a liar. We are trying to protect you against government and private investigation techniques, malicious attacks, identity theft, and people (esp. cops) who steal your computer. We cannot protect you against people looking over your shoulder, emf bugs, hidden cameras, angry family members, people you blab to, aliens, psychics, super-advanced technocratic conspiracies, or other imaginary things (but keep an eye out for our Ultimate Guide to Tinfoil Hats), etc. We also can’t give you a 100% guarantee you won’t fall under suspicion, but we can reduce the risks and give you several layers of deniability if you do.

Second, the laws in your country, particularly the UK, may make it legal to compel you to reveal passwords and other encryption keys using so-called rubber-hose cryptanalysis. In the United States, you are protected against self-incrimination by the 5th amendment. We will try to reinforce that right or replace it where it does not exist.

Finally, we are neither security gurus nor lawyers.  Rely on your own judgment, don’t do things you think are dumb because we told you to, and do not assume that we’re taking responsibility for your safety. The idea is to give you pretty damn good security, to make you a hard target. You should not be so inconvenienced by this setup that it’s impossible to use, or you’ve already lost the fight.

Getting on With It

Got that? Great. Let’s get going. We take a four-tiered approach to securing your activity. First, we’re going to secure your base operating system and build you an encrypted partition for storing your private data that as far as anyone knows not even government agencies can crack. Then we’re going to create a secret volume inside that partition that is undetectable without a second set of encryption keys, which will give you some plausible deniability. On that internal hidden drive we’re going to place an entire secret operating system, which you’ll be able to run seamlessly from within your normal system. We’ll harden that guest (hidden) system to the best extent possible. Next, we’ll anonymise your online presence using a combination of good practices and some useful software.

The tools we’re going to use here are all open-source and free, including TrueCrypt, a very strong deniable encryption package, Sun VirtualBox, a virtualization suite for creating your hidden operating system, and your choice of operating system for the hidden system. We’ve evaluated a broad range of OSes for the third part and settled on astripped down, hardened Xubuntu Linux distro. We are going to assume you’re running Windows XP or Vista for your host (main) OS, but if you run Linux already that’s even better. If you pick Windows for your guest (hidden) OS you need to reconsider how serious you are about this. More about the host and guest OS choice in part 4 (please hold back your bitching about it until then!).

Go ahead and go download TrueCrypt, VirtualBox, and the Xubuntu Live CD right now (you can skip the last if you have other preferences and know what you’re doing setting up a guest OS in a virtual machine). Everything else we’ll need is going to be downloaded inside your hidden operating system. If you get bored, here’s some further reading on the concepts we’re going to apply – it’s not required but it’ll help you understand why we’re doing this.

• Virtualization
• Deniable Encryption
• Onion Routing
• Public Key Cryptography

Keep an eye out for part 2!

(fr) adj. fre·er, fre·est 1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. 2. Not controlled by obligation or the will of another: felt free to go. 3. Not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance.

meme

(mm) n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally  or by repeated action from one mind to another.

We take it to be a given that copyright is not only an unnecessary evil, but is actually holding back all of human progress. It is inimical to the basic nature of information, which is to be free, to be exchanged, to evolve. From the basic language of life itself to the most brilliant literary and artistic works, information begets information, and each novel idea owes its existence to countless ideas that came before it.

We are not here to argue against copyright philosophically, economically, practically, or emotionally; that has been done exhaustively and eloquently and bears no further discussion. We need not argue that human progress has done just fine in absence of intellectual property for most of 300,000 years of existence, nor do we need to dispel common fallacies and historical misconceptions about its effects or nature. We need not laugh at the idea that the copyright monopolists somehow protect, encourage, or reward artists. We have nothing new present beyond the thousands of examples of open source software and free exchange of information that literally powers the entire global economy. We should not have to explain the self-evident fact that intellectual monopoly cannot coexist with personal freedom, privacy, and ownership of personal and real property. We cannot present a legal argument defending the free exchange of ideas, as the legal systems of most of the world are corrupted and perverted by anti-mind, anti-liberty thugs and mystics beyond any hope of functionality.

Our purpose here is not to convert – either you are with us, you are against us, or you are too ignorant to be capable of declaring a side. No, all that is left to us now is to fight.