Selected Papers in Anonymity

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...

1) Accounts can be obtained at a network which is KNOWN not to discover who the owners are. These accounts can then be used to open other accounts at other organizations and networks in a sort of graph, and eventually double back on themselves once or twice.

2) For networks which do not allow anonymous accounts, nor allow the use of other "anonymity-friendly" networks to authenticate with or create accounts, one would have to use account hijacking. That is to say, use an existing account belonging to an existing member. This should be done carefully, as the member might have to face consequences for any actions you perform with their account, if they are discovered. It is advisable to know whether the organization has a provision for dropping proceedings against members whose accounts have been found to be "hacked".

Of course, with all this, you would still have to make sure repeated communication does not bear any fingerprints that could be used to identify you. For instance: the language you use, the time of day you post, the location you post from, the subject you post about, all those things must have a sufficient number of possible candidates so as to make actually confronting them in person (or e.g. tampering with their internet connection) infeasible or unattractive.

I figure since this is Hacker News, it is a good place to post this analysis.

Sadly, I tried to imagine I'd need to be as anonymous as possible and couldn't even figure out how to get an untraceable email address (legally). My basic thought was to use some public WLAN (hoping for no MiTM), ideally not close to where I actually live and then use Tor to create a Hushmail account (as I recall the EFF recommends it). Alas it seems that's already flawed since a quick websearch suggests Hushmail cooperates with government agencies.

Admittedly I haven't spend a lot of time researching available options but I think it's pretty hard to even get step 1 right. I can only imagine how hard it must be for someone who isn't tech saavy at all.

Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router

Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms

Location Diversity in Anonymity Networks

Basically, Roger Dingledine and David L. Chaum

If interested in pseudonimity, an interesting keyword is "Direct Anonymous Attestation" -- the protocol was first invented in the context of the Trusted Computing and generated a lot of interesting research.