What are the best strategies for protecting your online identity?
And, Pulse is partnering with Tor on a series of posts about people protecting their online identity; the first post on Mauritania is below--look for more posts in coming weeks from writer Jillian C. York.
Since Tor’s inception, it has been used for a variety of purposes all across the globe. In this piece, we’ll take a look at Mauritania, where dissidents and activists have used Tor to distribute information, while ordinary citizens have used it to view filtered opposition web sites.
From 1984 to 2005, Mauritania was under the rule of Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya. Taya’s oppressive regime led to a great number of opposition groups. When the Internet first hit Mauritania in 1997, opposition groups began using mailing lists and web sites in their battle against the regime. And as Internet penetration in Mauritania increased, so did its use by such groups, who moved from utilizing mailing lists to disseminate information to publishing anti-government literature on web sites.
As media was censored by the regime, the Internet served the opposition groups well, that is, until December 2004, when the government began filtering the Mauritanian Internet. Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian dissident now based in the United States, says that he had discovered Tor while doing research and, upon learning about the filtering in Mauritania, wrote a quick guide to using Tor in Arabic and shared the program and guide with fellow members of opposition groups back home.
Weddady also realized that there was a need for anonymity for opposition members working for the government, as Mauritanian intelligence was aware that vital information was being sent from government computers. He therefore set up members’ computers with Tor, and taught them how to use it.
Tor was useful not only to dissidents, but to the wider public as well. As mirror sites slipped away into the filters, Weddady worked to ensure the greater public’s awareness of Tor. Cybercafés were the main point of Internet access at the time for most Mauritanians, thus Weddady circulated information to them. Tor allowed the average Internet user to access opposition and news sites that hadn’t escaped the filters.
After the failed attempt to filter the Internet, the government stopped most, if not all, filtering activities. Weddady says, “Tor rendered the government’s efforts completely futile. They simply didn't have the know-how to counter that move. Ironically, we felt even more secure because we learned an invaluable lesson: encrypt and anonymize.”
Still, Weddady stresses the importance of not jamming Tor with useless traffic such as downloading multimedia: “At any given moment, there’s someone out there whose freedom and security depends on how much bandwidth is available for Tor nodes.”
Comments
You don't need to go to Mauritania
Even in a so-called democratic, christian, ocidental and european 1st world country you can find many reason to use Tor and anonymity.
We have here, in Portugal, a case were a blogger, who writes with his real identity, that put some documentation about our Prime Minister education certificates online and the government tried to shut in down and take him to court. They dropped the complaint because the documents were real... of course, nothing happened to the Prime Minister too. But that's not the only case.
Although censorship is not so declared and clear to the common people, the "war" on anyone the publishes some critical documents on the web is very visible.
Needless to say that most of those authors are anonymous and some do use TOR, Privoxy, Anonymouse, Anonymizer and open proxy lists hence I saw that mentioned in a couple of blogs.
Also , many public services have filtering on their servers -- which is good if you want to avoid gaming and/or pornography -- that are used to disallow people from reading a lot of websites and even constraint the usage of search engines. I had information that some places have filters so badly tuned or biased that they allow porno to be seen by employees but not online newspapers and blogs.
Well! They don't arrest people nor drag them from home without some kind of proof... yet.
yes, Tor is important all over the world
Thanks for your comment, there are many areas that we hope to highlight in the Tor pieces.
The specific concerns of areas like Portugal are of interest; look for more articles on anonymity concerns soon--
Thanks for sharing
I wasn't aware that Portugal was of concern. If you have more resources to read up on the state of censorship or monitoring in Portugal, I'm interested.
Note that...
... the censorship is more subtle hence we are a "democracy".
Examples are in portuguese, sorry. You'll have to use Altavista's Babelfish or Google's Translate to try to read it.
Special legislation that will force telecommunication service suppliers to save communication data over an year, i.e. all internet traffic, emails, voice and sms from citizens, in case judiciary could need it. Notice that there is in Portugal a person that supervise all polices (public security, judiciary, secret services, etc) and that person depends directly from the Prime Minister alone.
http://exameinformatica.clix.pt/foco/especial/194735.html
Note that Europol wants to keep those data for as much as three years.
Other cases where many alleged documents appeared connected with local politicians:
http://a-sul.blogspot.com
http://oplano.blogsome.com
http://alhosvedrosaopoder.blogspot.com
http://umportodostodosporum.blogspot.com/
All above are anonymous but the innuendos and low level comments against the authors any time something surfaces seemed to be clear indicators of what could happen if they know who they are. Some blogs where sabotaged several times to try to shut them off.
A sample of a confidential document that shouldn't have being made public:
http://umportodostodosporum.blogspot.com/2008/07/polticos-muito-vivos-du...
The links inserted in the post above point to several posts with documentation related with less than clear deals between the local municipality and some urban promoters.
This author's blog was threatened with law suits because he propeled the last huge teatchers' marchs against the government education politics.
http://educar.wordpress.com/
This author was sued and is with a court order restriction just because he complaint against a big finance group that owns an hospital. Notice that he shoed off private documents that did belong to him so no unlawful document disclosure can be pulled here.
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/hospital-amadora-sintra-este...
And, curious enough, the prosecutor keeps an eye on him :)
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/hospital-amadora-sintra-serv...
Blogging and anonymous blogging is huge here in Portugal but people vote less and less and you don't see a public civil society movement alive. This should mean something, I think.
So, you see. Due to the "securitization" of our western world more and more means to preserve our movements and privacy are needed... even if we are doing nothing wrong... like just writing this text ;)
I do understand that, due to terrorism, big crime and pedophilia this may be necessary but... we would supposed that criminals are intelligent and that they know how to protect themselves. If they don't then they don't deserve to be criminals, eh eh.
But Who Guard the Guardians?
This article about the "Concepts of Liberty" is very interesting (you must translate it):
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/como-a-liberdade-negativa-le...
And read this one too: The supremacy of the single thought (in Googlese).
Hope this helps.
Another very interesting case
Another very interesting case was a published local newspaper that had its sponsors menaced by persons connected to the local ruling political parties coalition so they stopped financing it and it had to suspend the printed version of the newspaper.
Neither a legal action was made against the alleged menacers neither against the newspaper director whom made an editorial about it.
Rest to say that the newspaper editor was a former mayor for the same political force and that his daughter, and also a partner in the newspaper, is one of our national deputies for the other party belonging to the same coalition and she is influencial in it...
Maybe, and I say maybe, the final result would be other if these "relations" did not exist.
Ah! The original "complaint" is no longer available online and the digital newspaper is again sponsored even by the municipality, although still gently criticizing the ruling coalition.
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Putting the face on a post about tor...
... is funny :)