Anonymity - how?

As a concequence of recent legislation in my country I think I'm in need of some advise on anonymity. The new law will prompt the military to monitor all electronic traffic that "crosses the borders" in both directions. I live in Sweden, and my ISP:s servers are allegedly placed in Stockholm. As far as I can find out every anonymizing service save perhaps one works from abroad. Encryption is ok for e-mail, but it's nobodys goddam business where I surf, especially not the military's. And no, I don't have any criminal intentions; even if I had, I would still object to the army taking over the police's job. It's not fitting for a democracy. So how do I get anonymous right from my own PC?

 

I don't have any answer to your question but I hope that my country (Finland) didn't follow Swedish.

 

I won't get political, but I'm telling you right now this type of legislation is going to spread like a wildfire and things will get much worse as far as privacy is concerned before they ever get better (if they ever will of course). Perhaps a VPN is what you're going to need, and may be the only solution for you. Sweden was one of the last places most expected this kind of legislation, but when it did happen, you no longer should have expected your own country to not follow suit.

 

I think it may, unwittingly. If you're using a Swedish ISP your traffic may very well be routed "across the border". Sorry about that.

 

I've been contemplating that, but from what I've seen so far it's beyond my competence. Should I use OpenVPN? Is it possible, really, to tunnel between your computer and the ISP server without the cooperation of yout ISP? And...(a host of questions excluded to keep this post within reasonable limits).

Well, the Finnish have a reputation in Scandinavia for being born fighters, willing to take on any enemy no matter how powerful. Let's see if they live up to that reputation this time .

 

You could try the swedish anonymity service Relakks or you can use psiphon.
Maybe you can share your connection with som poor chinese fellow in misery and you both surf safely.
After all I am sure Swechelon cant compare to the more experienced Golden Wall and psiphon penetrates Golden wall afaik.
And then you allways have TOR.
But I guess Rellakks is the one with the best speed.

 

Well, the only issue I see with Relakks is that due to the new law, it may not be so anonymous anymore since it's in Sweden (I thought) At the very least I'm betting higher up sets of eyes will be looking at it fairly carefully.

@ Emmpe, I don't know enough about VPNs to help out with those questions. As far as the Finnish being born fighters, I'm well aware of their willingness to fight However, laws to "protect" them (as they would most assuredly be told) might go over easier to the less well-informed of your population.

 

It's true, relakks is dead now under their current business model. no more anonymity from them.

 

Could you please specify? Relakks does seem to be a Swedish thing, all right, which is what I'm looking for, living in Sweden. To be honest privacy isn't the main concern here, but rather to achieve as high a level of obstruction as possible. Privacy enhancement would be a welcome bonus, though.

 

Relakks has no choice but to allow the government to monitor all of their clients. Same with any US company.

 

Which is the worst possible combination. Single hop proxy in the same jurisdiction as you, that has compulsory logging is not any impediment at all. Anyone who came after you would automatically have the all the authority they needed if your proxy was in sweden, and thus actually makes you a bigger target, not a smaller one. You need a proxy outside of sweden.

 

Does anyone what the laws are like in other countries?

 

I can tell you about the EU. There is a directive 2006/24/EC about data retention, that is meant to be fully working in March 15 2009. The minimum requirements of this directive seem to be the logging of sender, reciever and time of day of any electronic message. Length of storage is still under debate, I think. The majority of EU countries haven't implemented it yet, but they'll have to, though a couple of them may try to dodge the issue in some way - it depends on the public's resistance.

 

As the spin goes, domestic communication is not to be monitored. I realize it will be, anyway, though the results cannot be used against anybody until the law is modified, which probably will happen within a few years. Until then, if ostentatively causing trouble is first priority and privacy only second, something like Relakks could be the thing - have I got it right?

 

Sweden is not a very big country. The only things that would allegedly not be monitored are circuits that are entirely within sweden, meaning if you were doing torrent traffic, all the seeders, leachers, trackers, and proxies would all have to be within the same country. This will of course not be the case for any of it.

 

Exactly. I want to emphasize that this is not a specifically Swedish issue at all. I'd also like to quote the people behind our national pride, The Pirate Bay, about the new law:
"Remember that if everything on the Web is monitored and regulated, everything you do may develop into resistance."

 

I have thought this thing a lot because I believe that most of Finland connections goes through Sweden. If I understand correctly main reason why Sweden set this law is Russia. Most of Russias network data goes through Sweden like Finland too. Okay so I have to do something now. I'm waiting now what is the price of that "cheaper" XeroBank VPN and after that choose my solution.

 

The FRA, that is to carry out all monitoring, was actually created mainly to spy on Soviet Union radio communication, and they still seem to have a bias towards Russia. But I think the main reason for the legislation is that FRA has the resources, both technical and human. Several years ago it surfaced that the military like to employ hackers with a criminal record because of their supposed high competence. But now we're not talking security any more, but paranoia.