Anonymity is probably your best defense on the Internet. You'll
want to be able to surf the Internet, send / receive email, and
post to news groups as anonymously as possible.

(1) Surfing the net:

Go through a proxy server, or a series of FREE, public proxy
servers, as I do. The first step is to go to:

 http://www.antiproxy.com/proxysearch.php
or
 http://www.publicproxyservers.com/index.html
or
Google for public proxy servers

and search for available proxies that work from a port your
browser can access. You may want to search for proxies on port
80, which many firewalls allow to pass. The "www.antiproxy.com"
web site has the ability to test and ensure that any listed
proxy is accepting connections.

Armed with a list of proxy servers, begin testing them on your
browser. Look for a menu, on your browser, that will let you add
or change a proxy / port. You may want to test several to see
which proxy is the fastest. You should also change proxy servers
several times a week. In fact, you'll find that quite a few are
taken down after a few days because they were mistakenly left
open by an inexperienced system administrator or home user.

The next step is to use one of the following proxy servers that
are accessed by appending your destination URL to their URL.
These proxies are slow because everyone around the world uses
them regularly. To access the smirkingchimp, just use one of the
following URLs:

 https://proxy.magusnet.com/-_-http://www.smirkingchimp.com
or
 http://anonymouse.ws/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.smirkingchimp.com

The first proxy is located in Arizona, and will establish a
secure connection between your browser and the proxy. Everything
you type will be encrypted on the way to the proxy server, which
will forward your info un-encrypted to your destination URL.

The second proxy is located in Germany, and doesn't handle
cookies.

If you're in a hurry, or don't care to chain proxy servers, you
can just use one of the two proxies listed above, or just use
the first proxy you set by changing your browser settings.

(2) Email & news group posting:

PGP & GPG are popular encryption program FREELY available on the
Internet:

 http://www.pgpi.org/
 http://www.gnupg.org/
 http://www.philzimmermann.com/findpgp.shtml

You should ALWAYS use PGP or GPG when sending email to your
friends. Use the largest key length available, which varies with
each PGP & GPG version. The command line versions usually have
fewer problems because they're unaffected by operating system
related, graphical user environment issues.

Now you need to install Mixmaster client software to send email
messages, and post to news groups anonymously.

Volunteers around the world have set up these servers to
successfully thwart attempts at tracing the source of email
messages. As a user, you must assume that half of them are run
by governmental agencies or servers that have been hacked. This
isn't a problem as you normally route your email messages
through a series of them - I usually route my messages through
11 servers, and send 3 copies to help ensure the messages reach
their final destination. Sometimes it takes over 24 hours for a
message to reach its recipient, but that's partially what makes
messages virtually impossible to track.

The software takes your message, and either breaks it up into
29K sized messages, or pads characters to make it about 29K in
size. Then it encrypts your message with the keys of every email
server you route your message through, so only the final
Mixmaster server ever gets to see your actual email and
recipient. Since every email is virtually the same size,
encrypted, held for different lengths of time, along with other
waiting messages by each mixmaster server in the chain, before
it is re-mailed - out of sequence with its arrival time - it is
impossible to perform "traffic analysis" to follow an email
message from its origin to its destination.


If you're really paranoid, send your PGP encrypted email through
the Mixmaster remailer chain to the news group
[alt.anonymous.messages]. You'll have to come up with a title
that you & your correspondents secretly share. You can use the
same title over & over again.

When downloading the messages from the [alt.anonymous.messages]
news group, be sure to download many - if not ALL - of the other
messages. That way, no one will know which message actually
contains the real email destined for you. This way, no one will
ever know who you're corresponding with - even if the entire
Mixmaster remailer chain is ever compromised. Sending from
Mixmaster remailers to the [alt.anonymous.messages] news group -
or any news group, for that matter - only works for small
messages - well under 29KB - that Mixmaster doesn't need to
breakup.

****************************************************************
NOTE:
****************************************************************
If you have large messages, or find that your messages are not
being posted to the "alt.anonymous.messages" news group when you
send them via Mixmaster, just send your encrypted messages
directly to the "alt.anonymous.messages" news group, and avoid
using Mixmaster. You will not lose much in the way of anonymity.
****************************************************************

****************************************************************

Since few use the software, installing it may be a bit
difficult. I've installed both the Mac & Linux versions with
little difficulty, but have used the Linux version exclusively
for over a year.

The same software is used to post to news groups anonymously.

Windows users may want to try Quicksilver:
 http://www.quicksilvermail.net/

Mac users have to use:
 http://www.geocities.com:80/SiliconValley/Byte/6176/macmixmaster.html

Linux and *nix users can get the goods at:
 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=37891