Secure Comms for the Cool Cunny
Send anonymous hate speech!
A brief message from no-one
Today's article is sponsored by a never-ending backlog of books that I've collected. Why can't I be a Gothic author and spend a summer in a bum city townhouse, reading thoughts to forget them and to never write again? I guess that's a fate worse than clutter - to be enlightened without spreading it is like being a box without corners. This isn't an article about being a blogger though, or even an author, God help you if you go down that route, being an oligarchy of scumsuckers who want nothing more than to take your money for little of the risk, throwing paper at the wall and seeing what blends into the plaster. Maybe the books will sell. Probably not. Your publisher doesn't do your writing justice, because they likely haven't read it enough to understand the depth of your work. And if they did, would they market it to the audience you want? No. They would do it for the audience which throws money in the fountain because they like how it splashes.
How do you clean that backlog? I'm not prepared to answer that question. I will one day, when it happens, much like a drug addict needs to stop taking drugs to answer the question of "how do I stop taking drugs"? Well how the bloody hell am I supposed to tell you if I'm still on drugs? That's like telling your son to follow in your footsteps even though you were a dumbass for having a son in the first place. To write, you must have experience, and without that, you are a poser.
Anyway, here's Wonderwall.
Secure your communications
I lied.
Secure your (physical) communications
The first step to being somebody is talking with other people. Now before you stick your head in your ass (hereafter referred to as your happy place), let me assure you that I am no antisocial degenerate myself. It's just that everybody with my interests are either nazis, pedophiles, or anarchists, and you have to wonder where I fucked up in that grouping. I'm like the living incarnation of Reddit - a collection of criminal tastes bundled up in good intentions and a scruffy beard, and not the scruffy beard you'd be looking up at as you're gently fucked in the ass. If that sentence isn't relatable to you, any of it, you're either a loser, a virgin, or a normie. Those all sound bad, but most of the winners on Survivor were those three.
Now how do you do that, Froppy? I'm sorry to disappoint, Neetly, that I can't improve your social life. But I can amplify it by allowing you to talk to anybody you want without fear of being spied on. Keep in mind though, that this isn't a complete OPSEC guide et cetera on how to get past every single feat of CIA spooking, but it's good for a lot of cases!
The golden rule:
Never talk about anything to anybody else, even when you think you're anonymous, that you don't want other people to see. Even if you're some random asshole running a blog at froghand.neocities.org, never talk about anything that you would want the cops, the government, and your grandma to see (fuck your grandma!). In this day in age, silence is golden, because even the most innocuous of things that you post online can be eventually traced back to you with enough determination and legwork, and the things that you really, really wouldn't want anybody to see? If those get back to you, you're fucked.
So don't ironically text your friend porn of an underaged cat (there's a sentence that lawyers aren't prepared to deal with), because your friend is probably a leaky cunt (and not the good kind of leaky cunt, I can't believe it's not an underaged cat!) and will share that shit to whoever crosses their path. "Oh, what are you up to?" "Going to counselling because this dick texted me porn of the Love Live girl." "That's fantastic. I'm going to go try to fellate myself now so I forget that image.", and then he blog about it on Tumblr for the preteens to promptly hate-fap over. Froghand is a pedophile, the headlines would say. Ironic pornography leads to arrest, deportation to Somalia. K'naan sends his condolences. You see? It's a security risk.
If you are an anonymous blogger, may you rest in peace, because not even the most secure communication channels of Tor over a VPN with a turn-and-burn account paid for with mixed Bitcoin acquired through encrypted IRC chat and an unregistered prepaid card with the info written down and the card shredded and burned through another VPN paid for with cash-by-mail in an envelop paid for twenty years ago and all DNA scrubbed with soap, water, and latex before imprint with no return address and country-neutral postage accessed through fully-encrypted Tails on spoofed hardware and an encrypted unregistered flash drive with Peerblock and a restrictive firewall and a burner e-mail with PGP with a secondary throwaway address and a hundred-digit passcode can't keep out the most determined investigator. Of course they'd have to be a genius to get past that barrage of fucko, but if you ever get someone like that on your case, you should probably buy a gun.
Also if you do get arrested, YOU LOSE, but minimise the damage by asking for a lawyer and then shutting up forever. Most of the time, thugs don't have any idea that you committed a crime, and so they ignore the lack of evidence and interrogate you with lies and slander until you eventually confess. I will make this clear: never confess to a crime, because if you do, YOU DOUBLE LOSE. Also if you're in Japan, make a shiv early, because you're fucked. That's what happens when you live in a country which appeases powerful interests instead of the rights of the individual, which is why you can be put in jail for two years for downloading a song. Silly government just doesn't get it. If you outlaw file sharing, only outlaws will share files.
Enough arbitrary silliness. If you do decide to talk (you fool! the only security is to hide under a rock!), you can use some of these methods to do so, in order of most to least secure:
Actual, physical, meatspace talking:
Welcome to the bronze-age theocratic dictatorship mode of conversation. This where you have a face-to-face conversation with somebody. Yes, they're ugly. Please disregard that and think about somebody more attractive. You don't have to try to fuck them, and don't even bother trying to have a lasting relationship, as we have body pillows for that (all emotions can be simulated and how you get them is irrelevant. live shamelessly or die a shell). You probably know about how to talk with somebody, unless you've bene hiding under a rock (yes, good plan! nobody can see you now!), but the actual security considerations about how to talk with somebody have been disavowed by this modern, misguided notion of "trust".
Are you safe in your own home? In general, safer than most places, but are you sure that it isn't being spied on? If you happen to be a criminal (please launder your drug money through me), you may not be able to trust your home for communications. You should periodically check your devices for wiretaps, suspicious behaviour from outside, such as possible investigators, and be outside of the house for as much as possible so that your movements aren't predictable. I can't give you details, as I haven't learned much about this beyond some information I've gleamed, though if you are a criminal you probably didn't need my advice. Consider this a reminder, I suppose, that getting lazy leads to convictions.
So where do you go if you can't trust your house? Generally any public source with a lot of background noise, little surveillance, and an area that isn't too suspicious for two people to be in. Good places to shoot the breeze (not literally. that's just silly) include public beaches, parks, and strip clubs, though watch out for cameras and whoever might be nearby. Assuming you can trust your conversation partner (and make sure this is the case - they might be a leaky cunt), this provides a channel of communications which isn't easily intercepted.
To obscure whatever you're talking about, you can talk in a language that the majority of people in your country don't know, whisper your chat through a cupped-hands-to-ear system (works best if you're a teenage girl), and move around as much as possible to make it look like you're out and about for entirely innocent purposes. These simple steps make it so that it is very difficult to discern what you are talking about, as well as making it difficult to discern if you're even talking about anything important. Keep in mind that the likelihood of somebody snooping in on your offline talks are awfully low, but if you do have some important things to say, then it's best to be on the safe side than have the FBI at your door asking why you pirated Paul Blart 2.
Chatroom Bumming
I was playing too much Deus Ex and as a result of which forgot to write this article until the point of no return where the world starts to make a lot less sense and you feel a lot worse about yourself. Alcohol isn't a depressant (but it is, it is), the bloody lunar cycle is. What does this mean for you, the consumer? Now unlike some bloggers who whine without providing context, I brought this up to talk about story in video games: people talk to you through your head. That was it.
Now if you want to be like Mr. Deux Ex, you might want to consider taking all your conversations off the meatgrid (translators note: meat means real) and instead take it to the Internet, where it's considerably much less safe from snoopers but has the whole "talk with anybody in the world" thing going for it, which sounds nice until you realise that you'll never get a reply unless you succ fucc and swalloww whoever you're trying to talk to (unless they're not a dick, in which case, all bets are off). But if you've already whored yourself out, and I mean REALLY prostituted yourself, then you probably already have somebody to talk to. So let me give you some chat options so that you don't have the feds looking at your secret sexts.
Ricochet (not the shitty Valve game) is an application designed to make your Internet chats as anonymous as is reasonable, as well as being dead easy to use. It ensures that you cannot be personally identified by not making you sign up for an account, it ensures that no cops are able to snoop your chats by relaying everything through the Tor network (and burning your unique Tor address whenever you want to disappear), it prevents local surveillance by destroying all chat logs as soon as the chat is over, making it a portable installation so that it doesn't write anything to your registry, and also encrypts all the data so it ends up as an unrecoverable mess, further supported by Tor encrypting it through its own system. It's a simple system used to talk with people you trust in a very secure way, though remember to never say anything you wouldn't want an enemy to see, as trust is often a fatal error.
Tox is a distributed and encrypted chat program notable for its strong cryptographic principals, and though that sentence is as dry as my toungue, it's true, damn it! Tox is useful because it allows groups of complete strangers to get together in a secure fashion, so long as you send each other the links using e-mail or something. It's a simple application that lets you turn and burn it whenever you want, as well as providing the means to keep in contact with a group of close companions through live chat.
Jitsi is a service made by people who shared frog memes on Skype but then realised it was bad so they decided to make their own client instead. The documentation on Jitsi is a lot less extensive than that of the other applications, though it's still a much more secure application than Skype, which has a backdoor from Microsoft and is being used by the NSA to store all your conversations. Jitsi is good for casual stuff that isn't too serious, but if you have friends like that, you're probably too cool for this blog. My main demographic is either freeters or people so paranoid they can't function in society, so welcome to the club! You're here forever.
If you didn't find your favourite chat app on here, so long as it isn't closed-sourced software like Skype, Whatsapp, Google Allo, and every other piece of software designed to mine your data and then sell to advertisers at the cost of fundamental liberty, then please use that, though keep in mind I have chosen these because I believe them to be more secure than what you would find in an average discussion of applications, including that of privacytools.io and prism-break.org.
And though these services may provide additional services such as voice and video chat, I do not use them because any sort of breach of identity can be a permanent mark on the rest of your online life, where even innocent details like your voice from a few years ago can be used to identify you. You're better safe than sorry, and though this makes online dating difficult, I suppose that's the risk vs. reward you have to take, not that you'd ever be likely to find a mate online.
Calling on your cell phone
The device which you probably use every single day is one of the least secure devices you can carry around. Despite the technology being used by everybody and their grandmother, both the government (any government!) and the companies who support the operation of your phone have the ability to track where you are, who you call, what you use your cell phone for, and every conversation you've ever made, all in the clear, unencrypted for them to take. It's a grim fable, and as such I recommend not using a cell phone if you can help it, and if you can't, to keep it "off" for as long as you can.
Let's start with location tracking. Your cell phone requires the use of cellular towers to make and place calls, and will try to connect to every single tower out there, even ones which aren't genuine. As a result of this, it's trivial for the people who own the towers to get an indication of yourp osition, where you're going, and where you have travelled with your cell phone are you. If you leave your cell phone in one place, say your home, the snoopers have a good idea about where to find you if they want to. Though correlating the data with some randy online is really hard, it helps to consider this if you're a part of a criminal interest.
In addition, the operating systems on most cell phones are closed-source or proprietary, meaning that the operators can install data collection programs without your knowledge or consent, and there's no way to verify that this isn't happening without reverse-engineering the software, being a bitch to do for anybody and an unworthy task for whoever isn't getting paid to do so. When you consider that the two most popular operating systems, iOS and Android, are owned by companies who have the capacity to retain data on literally billions of users indefinitely and hand then over to the United States government whenever they please, it leads to a lack of trust in a phone you thought little of.
Anti-surveillance laws or Fourth Amendment clones in civilised countries, as opposed to military dictatorships and the like, prevent any of the collected phone calls or text messages from being used in a trial, giving you some amount of security from passive surveillance (not that it stops governments from collecting the data, because those who make the law are above it). It is the idea though, that they have the capacity to obtain this data whenever they want that leads to a lack of trust, and is a reminder to never say anything that might cause you trouble later on.
To mitigate a great deal of this risk, you can use an application called Signal (look for it on whatever your app store is) to encrypt your messages and phone calls with everybody else who uses Signal, for free. You need a phone number to register the device, in which case you can simply bum somebody else's number or spoof a VOIP number. It doesn't work with people who don't use Signal, in which case they get what they deserve for leaving their messages in the clear, but it will still place unencrypted phone calls and texts to everyone else, in which case go-go gadget recruit everybody to use Signal so I don't have to be curt on my cellular device.
E-mail and you!
I already wrote this bloody section! It's at the Great Guide to E-mail Clients, and goes over what you need to know. Some bullet points? Encrypt your e-mails, use a secure client, and keep in mind that your e-mail metadata and subject lines are in the clear. Always send from a VPN or Tor, and make sure to create an account entirely seperate from all your current personas.
The Snail Mail Conspirate
Using actual mail in this day and age is just begging for trouble. Not only is your address in the clear for anybody to take a look at, there is also nothing stopping some random asshole from going through your mail and reading all the stuff you were about to receive. Any attempts of encrypting the data by using a cipher would signal you out as worryingly paranoid, as well as being an impractical mode of communication. The only reason you should ever have mail is if you're expecting a letter bomb to end your miserable life.
If ever you must recieve something from the actual, physical, meatspace world that isn't a letter or some other information you could get using e-mail, a mesage board post, an online chat, a text, in-person, or publicly-indexed websites, then have it sent to an address where you can pick it up, such as a business address, the front office of where you live, or somebody else's house (assuming they aren't l e a k y). Assuming that you're only doing this to get goods you purchased online (which is a bum proposition in itself, seeing as Amazon is abusive and every other website either sells used goods or is shady af), I pray you have considered all other options before going through with this plan, including businesses, flea markets, Craigslist, specialty shops, and any other place you can buy stuff anonymously with cash. Even your local grocery store is more secure than online shipping, if only because you don't have to give up any personal information whatsoever and you can pay in cash, a medium which cannot be (realistically) traced back to you.
Without going into too much detail about the logistics of online purchasing and how it relates to the physical snooping of materials, I will say that online merchants are designed to extract as much information as possible about users so that they may sell things to them more easily, as well as retaining all the data you give them so they may sell it to advertisers and use it to better understand their userbase and target advertisements and products to them. If you give them your address, your credit card, and your name, assume they have it forever. It is a grave mistake to give personal information to any company, as any company with the capacity to retain such data, no matter how it is stored or distributed, is not to be trusted.
Conclusions
Basically everything you do is vulnerable to being intercepted and nobody can ever have any fun because Big Brother ruined it for everyone. The safest solution is to create an underground civilisation of mole people where all conversation takes place through a language blended between every dialect of both Arabic and Sinitic (we'll sort out the details later) so that nobody can understand our communications but us. Our Internet will come from I2P exclusively, and we will make an economy based on rare fefes.
I realise this sounds horrible, but we don't know until we try. We could build a prototype with DOOM maps and hack in our own fefe enemies, a representation of our slavery to a currency nobody asked for. We will be unknown, but we will be glory in our own way, and just like Sparta, will last for six hundred years.
Or you can play Minecraft all day.
Speak the easy truths from Froghand.
Today's page was updated on June 15, 2016!
E-mail Pornhub and ask them for a Tor address. #froghandfaphand.