Online Camouflage for Liberty Operators

As many of you know, we have decided to volunteer our energy and experience in helping the Liberty movement in general and the American Redoubt cause in particular to communicate in a more anonymous and some what more secure method.  I hope this will eventually grow into a series of Liberty focused “darknet” or private, more secure and highly anonymous network services (chat, email, file sharing) offered on various darknets and thus call this project the American Redoubt Darknet (ARD) or AmRD project.  Currently we have recommended a series of tools that after significant research I feel will greatly improve the Liberty / American Redoubt community.

1.  Encourage all Liberty bloggers to move to strict SSL.
2.  Use non-IE browsers such as Firefox when browsing.
3.  Use the Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) to visit political sites.
4.  Use TAILS when interacting on the liberty blog-o-sphere
5.  For any data you have that is private use Truecrypt to protect it

I can guarantee that if the Liberty movement is listening, people and entities who oppose your God-given right to assemble and speak freely, privately and anonymously have started to take notice because it may make their desire to put a government minder in every room in America a little harder.

This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed on the very popular Radio Free Redoubt (RFR) by John Jacob Schmidt.  During the interview we talked about the American Redoubt Darknet (AmRD) project.   I announced on his show that I believe the best darknet technology to build a Liberty focused communication platform on was the Invisibility Internet Project (i2p).  In this post I will introduce i2p, how it works, why I think it can be useful and what you can do to help.  We will not go into how to download it and use it, which will be covered in a future article.  I will not go into why you would want to use i2p and other darknets to communicate anonymously or securely, as I have approached those topics previously.  What was legal yesterday, may not be legal tomorrow.

Don’t put it on your computer if you can write it down or say it face-to-face.

Don’t write it down if you can memorize it.

Darknets are basically parts of the Internet that are not easily accessible, not easily searchable, and not easily monitored.  They normally have significant additional security consisting of multiple levels of security and significant additional anonymity consisting of randomization of traffic paths.  I think of it as the Red Light district of the Internet, what we use to call shanty town, the “bad’ part of town.  Side Note:  I was surprised to meet very normal seeming people on the i2p darknet, kinda of strange.  There are three darknets that we looked at, The Onion Router (TOR) network, Freenet and the Invisible Internet Project (i2p).  The other major darknet is GUNet, however no one with experience in GUNet darknet has volunteered for the American Redoubt Darknet project yet.  Each of these has mobile versions, TOR has the Orbot darknet for Android mobile phones and i2p has Nightbweb for Android phones.

I have already introduced the strengths and weakness of TOR.  It is pretty good and really the only game in town on “more anonymously” reaching the normal Internet.  Think of it as camouflage not a magical invisibility field. TOR has these powerful high bandwidth “out proxies” all over the world.  However I cannot shake the feeling that TOR is allowed to exist to be a “honey pot” allowing people to self identify as someone the “…adversaries of global reach…” want to watch.  This is why I encouraged the TOR Browser Bundle (TBB) and the use of SSL on top of TOR.   The biggest weakness of TOR is its out proxies, where TOR reaches the general Internet.  This is where activities consist with “…adversaries with global reach…” attempting to break TOR have been detected.   I believe using TOR is a net benefit, it is very anonymous and fairly secure (more so with SSL).  And equally I also believe you are adding your voice screaming into the darknet about drag net police state surveillance; however I would not bet my freedom on TOR.   Look at how TOR Email server was hacked by the FBI and how a drug cartel called the Silk Road was compromised by the FBI. To date I have no knowledge of a compromise of i2p.  Most likely because it is so new, it will happen I am sure. You cannot fix stupid.  I2p has a drug market place like the Silk Road, but it is fairly hard to get into to keep out the riff raft.   I am not encouraging people to visit the market on i2p, or any of the other Hidden market places that come and go on TOR and i2p but I am strongly encouraging people to understand how they securely operates on the Internet.

One of the largest weaknesses in TOR is its greatest strength and that is reaches the “normal” Internet, and does it fairly fast, but that is where your security and anonymity are often attacked.  I2p for the most part addresses that by basically not even trying to be a great gateway to the “normal” Internet.  If you want to reach the Charles Carroll Society (CCS) or other normal sites on the insecure, non-anonymous Internet use TOR.  If you want to communicate as securely and anonymously as possible via forum based bulletin boards, email, chat or transfer files between each other in the most secure method possible use i2p.

In the simplest terms i2p is a darknet simliar to TOR that tries to improve on TOR in every way technologically possible.  However to achieve that i2p does not focus itself on reaching the normal Internet, it focuses itself on allowing the most secure and anonymous communications between i2p users.  You are the most difficult to find and track when you stay “in” or “on” the i2p darknet.  Thus the best use of i2p is for both people to use i2p and then for you to use Instant Messager (IM) or chat, email and file transfers all inside i2p.  I don’t use i2p to reach the “normal” Internet, I use the Tor Browser Bundle, but I use i2p to chat and email between i2p users.  When you talk about websites, forums, chat servers and other servers that are “in” the i2p darknet geeks refer to them as eepSites. These are simply normal websites that can only be reached by using i2p.  You reach them by the .i2p extension in your browser, for example forums.i2p.  You can only reach eepSites through i2p.  Go ahead, put forums.i2p into your browser and see what happens.  Nothing.  Once you learn how to use i2p, it will show up.   TOR has also grown in using only websites that are available internal to its darknet.  TOR now has its own darknet sites called TOR hidden services.  You can reach TOR hidden services by the extension .onion, and you  can only reach them when you are on the TOR darknet.  Don’t believe me, go ahead and try to reach the New Yorker’s Strong box in your normal browser.

What can you do with i2p?  One great example of darknet sites is the new Yorker Strongbox site which is a TOR Hidden Server, not an i2p eepSite, but it demonstrates the point.  This is a site that allows people to securely and anonymously submit files to The New Yorker journalist, i.e. a place for whistle blowers.  The only way you can reach this site is through TOR’s darknet.   If you try and reach New Yorker’s Strong Box without the TOR Browser Bundle nothing will happen.  However if you download the TOR browser bundle, and then return to the CCS and click on that link  you will see it come up.  By keeping their drop box on TOR it makes it much harder for people to figure out whom is transferring information to The New York magazine.

I2p in many ways is a natural outgrowth of TOR.  It is a bunch of developers looking at TOR and other anonymity networks and improving on them.  For example i2p uses an improved Onion routing where your information is sent one way outgoing, and another way incoming.  When the information is in “the darknet” it is mixed more than TOR and i2p address yet another layer of security.  The improvements in the TOR networking are called “garlic routing” in honor of TOR’s onion routing.

One of the improvements that i2p introduces over TOR is that everyone who is a client, is also a router.  Now you are not a router “into the normal Internet” which is good, but you are a router in the i2p network.  If you listen to my interview on RFR with JJS then this means every person also runs the technology to “get into” the various gorilla suites.   All the traffic that passes through your router is encrypted anonymous traffic which is staying on the i2p darknet.  I wrote about how people from Ukraine apparently become more active on i2p during their recent violent revolution.  And how people from Ukraine, unknown to them were using my i2p router / console to get past their government attempt to limit their ability to communicate.  Every person who uses i2p reaches out and randomly uses a random number of other i2p router / consoles.  This means if you want to help the cause of Liberty today,  right now, if you want get into the fight against dragnet surveillance, simply download and install i2p, primarily on a more stable desktop like your computer at home.  I will explain that in a future article.  Laptops that you move all the time are not optimal, but can work.   You immediately make it more difficult for “…adversaries with global reach…” to attack the i2p darknet because there is one more i2p router.  I have found that I2p will work best if you set it to match the speed of your Internet connection and that I do not notice it, if I set it so it uses 30% of my Internet speed to share.  Please remember I2P is a self containing network, all traffic produced by I2P users must be routed via I2P users. If you do not share any bandwidth, the others I2P routers need to take up that load! There are NO dedicated fast routing servers like in TOR provided by the I2P team – the users itself are building the network. The more bandwidth is shared by single routers, the faster single transfers will happen!  Again more on that in the post going over in detail how to install and configure it.  However again, if you want to get into the fight today, download it install it, and start playing around with it.

In future articles we will share how to use i2p to Chat and email each other and the normal Internet. For now, I would encourage everyone who is upset about Dragnet surveillance conducted by our godless authoritarian regulatory surveillance state to simply download i2p, set it to start and update automatically and let it run.  If you know your bandwidth speed, please  set that number in the bandwidth setting.  This is how much YOU can use of i2p.  Then consider setting i2p to “share” or bandwidth uses by others (like me) to 30% of your bandwidth.  In this way you can strengthen i2p network and protest dragnet surveillance.  The more router / consoles that come on line sharing more bandwidth, the stronger the i2p network is.

Download i2p console and router. Donate to i2p here, keep the hackers making these tools.  Here is a great review of i2p, TOR and FreeNet.

I am inviting any person who has IT experience and is supportive of the Liberty movement and / or American Redoubt objectives to join us and pool our resources and talents in helping people use the Internet now, and potentially in a “rebuilding” mode in a more secure and anonymous manner.  If you are a God-fearing, liberty loving computer or networking professional supportive of the Liberty cause in general and would like to assist in the AmRD project contact me.  If you have skills and / or desire, contact me anonymously.