Your Anonymous Posts to Secret Aren’t Anonymous After All

Your Anonymous Posts to Secret Aren’t Anonymous After All.

Related: Hackers Have Found 42 Security Holes In Anonymous App Secret, Including A Way To Reveal A Specific Friend's Posts.

-- Tom

 

Makes me think of the subtle debate surrounding Privacy vs Anonymity. People call the two concepts identical: they are not. I have a real world email account that depicts my real name. I choose a fairly private Email provider to host this account. Privacy does not mean that the person I am writing does not know my identity. Privacy means that I have reasonable assurances that the communication I am sending out is secure from prying eyes. Anonymity now is a different story. I chose various levels of anonymity based on the content of what it is I am sending. Using email as the communication means, I might use google or yahoo under a fake name if the communication is fairly lame and social yet I don't want the destination person to know who I am. Now say I am using a hidden service dark market to buy drugs (something I would never do). At that point anonymity becomes life critical. It is time for a new email account with a private provider created behind a vpn that doesnt log and then that email is ONLY accessed via the VPN. Next, I probably have tor configured as a system service and am using thunderbird with torbirdy configured to route the communication anonymized throught the tor network. The point is Privacy and Anonymity are different concepts and must be handled differently based on the specific need of the communication involved.

 

@RollingThunder

Good post

But about buying drugs, I've never understood how people can go to such great lengths to be anonymous, using Tor and clean Bitcoins and all that, and then give the seller their real post address. That was, by the way, what ultimately took down The Silk Road.

 

Thanks for the thumbs up Mirimir. I am not sure if Ross Ulbricht had given his real life post address when he made the credit card order that failed going through customes. I do know the actual circumstances that took down Silk Road is the CC order brought Ulbricht under investigation. The FBI had tempest equipment pointing at Ulbricht when he used an unsecured connection in a coffee shop to do a clear text login as DPR to the Silk Road. That is what nailed him for historical accuracy.

 

It's been a while since I followed this, so take what I say with some salt

From https://ia601904.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.238311/gov.uscourts.mdd.238311.4.0.pdf I get that an FBI undercover agent contacted him, wanting to sell bulk cocaine. Ross found a buyer, and delegated the details to an employee. The employee had full admin access to SR servers. The employee (like many SR users) provided his ACTUAL PHYSICAL ADDRESS to the FBI agent. The agent mailed 1 Kg (very highly cut) cocaine to the SR employee, who was arrested on receipt. Said employee then told the FBI all he knew about SR. Now the FBI had access to SR servers. Then they did the physical takedown that you describe.

It that all still more or less accurate? Or was the FBI lying in the complaint? If those things actually happened, do you know the timing relative to the events that you described? Thanks

 

I am going from memory. Somehow I suspect both our accounts are factual. It amused me that they caught ulbricht using an administrative login to Silk Road with tempest equiptment.