Revision as of 14:27, 25 May 2015

1. Knowing our digital shadow and the traces we leave in the internet

What is the information I leave online, what is my digital shadow? Who can collect or access this information? How can I find out? Can I control the information that is online about me? How can I influence my digital shadow? If you have one or several of those questions in mind, this how-to is for you!

Understanding our digital shadow

The internet is an amazing space to explore, learn, speak up, listen and communicate with people across the world. Unfortunately, the internet has also become a contentious space. There is a pushback against people who speak against, question or challenge the dominant discourse. These attacks by people, also known as trolls, can be very personal, as we are all giving out very personal information on the internet.

If someone of us is planning to be active on the internet as a feminist or as a woman human rights defender – or if we already are and have suffered attacks by harassers or trolls, or just want to improve our defences against this kind of attacks – it’s a good idea to start from an assessment of our digital shadow and social domains that are spread across our online and physical activities. These two aspects can tell a very accurate story about us; who we are, were we live and hang out, what we are interested in and who our friends are. This can expose us to several threats and can look scary at first sight, but as we will see in this booklet, there are actually many strategies we can adopt and tools we can use in order to shape or control our digital shadow and social domains and to obtain a greater security online.

What is a digital shadow?

Our digital shadows can be defined as the stories data tell about us. These digital shadows are created by trillions bits of data, digital traces we leave everyday when we connect to the Internet, our mobile and online services. Our digital shadows have a life of their own, are affected by others and change in unpredictable ways. Rather than as normal shadows, which are something impalpable and temporary, our digital shadows grow continuously, are permanent and we have little control over them. We could describe these traces as a spectre of our past and present activities, that melt together in a permanent and ever-changing profile and could potentially haunt us forever.

How are these trillion bits of data created? The devices and the software we use to browse the Internet, access websites, connect to social networks like Facebook or Twitter, publish blog posts, receive phone calls, send SMS messages or emails, chat or buy things online all create specific bits of data on us. These data bits can be our name, location, contacts, pictures, messages, tweets and likes, but also the brand of our computer, length of our phone calls and the websites we visit. These data traces can be put out there by us and other people.

How do we share data? In some cases we actively share data – when we share photos on Facebook, book a flight ticket or contribute to a wiki. Other people can hand over data about us by tagging us in pictures, mentioning us in tweets or simply communicating with us. In other cases, our data are passively collected, without our active knowledge or consent. Our browsing habits and IP address are collected while we visit a website by cookies and other tracking technology, which are active in the background. These technologies are included in websites for a wide range of purposes: from website analytics to the selling of advertisement. Our mobile phone apps collect data on us without our active knowledge or consent – think of the location data in the photos we take. These tracking technologies enable several web services to identify and follow us as we pass from our browser to the IM app in our smartphone, download e-books in our readers, publish pictures from the latest protest we have covered, or coordinate the next action with our group of activists.

What are data? Data can be broken into three parts: content, metadata and noise. Content is the content ofcour messages, blogs, tweets and phone calls, it is our picturescand videos. Metadata are data about data, information that is needed for the infrastructure to work. Metadata enable our email to be delivered, help find files on our computer and permit mobile communication. Metadata can be our email address, phone number, location, time and date when a message was sent or stored. Noise is the data that is created by either the manufacturing process or by the workings of the infrastructure. For example, every camera has an SD card to record and store pictures. Every SD card has unique scratches that were created by the machines producing the SD cards. These scratches make small changes to the data that are not visible to the eye but can be recognized by computers.

Why are these data collected?

We might wonder about the importance of one picture or one message, or think there are so many data out there that nobody knows what to do with it. In the digital age, data collection and data analysis move beyond what we can phantom. Data traces have unique characteristics – metadata – that are used to collect, analyse and sort data and create digital shadows, called profiles. Every time a new piece of data is collected, it is identified and added to the profile of a specific person. These profiles are ever expanding and give those who create them or have access to them an immense insight into who we are. Data are collected by companies, governments and individuals as they have a monetary value, give third parties insight to who we are and can be used to create harassment strategies.

What is so scary about the fact that companies, governments and trolls can create and hold profiles on us? It is not only that people who have access to our digital shadow, our profile, can see who we are, what we do and where we have been. They can also connect the dots and make predictions on these data. These predictions can tell them what we might do or might be in the future: if a third party knows that one of us is an outspoken blogger on gender issues in country x, there is a likelihood that they will be present at a conference on blogging and women in country x.

Profiles for more horizontal harassment, by trolls, give the ability to harass us across platforms; if all our identities are the same or different identities can be tied together, a harasser can use this profile to target all of our facets.

Read more about managing multiple identities in 5. Managing multiple online identitiess.

Another strategy is to buy time, continue monitoring profiles and networks till social networks change their privacy policies, which can change our private profiles without us knowing it.

Anyone can potentially have access to our digital shadow – including communications service providers, law enforcement agencies and companies, as well as groups and individuals running their own servers. We cannot know precisely what happens to our digital shadow and that itself is a problem.

Social domains: Our several small-world networks

As security expert Bruce Schneier explains, “Security is a chain, and a single weak link can break the entire system”.

Everyone of us belongs to several social domains – our work, activism, family, friends and other personal networks – and each intersection among these domains can turn into a threat for our security. Each of these spheres is structured as a “small-world network” – a group of not more than few dozens people who are frequently in contact with most of the other members of the group through phone calls, IM, mail messages, etc.

In each of these networks we may have a more or less important role and carry out different tasks and activities, and some of these domains may need to be more secure than others. For instance, we may tend to have a more secure behaviour for our work or activism and a less secure one for leisure and for interacting with friends on a social network. But if we use a single identity for all our social relationships and for all our personal domains, it becomes easier to gather information about us and to identify our vulnerabilities.

For example, if we reveal in a social network that we like a particular kind of games and that we download files with a p2p program like Emule, an attacker who wants to investigate our work or activism might inject a virus into our computer by having us download an infected proprietary game. An attacker might be interested in our activism but know that we have increased privacy and security measures for that part of our lives. The attacker knows that our love of games is a digital weak spot as this network is not encrypted. Thus the attacker exploits this part of our lives to gain access to our activism. This is only possible if our social network profile and our Emule profile can be connected to the same person, and this is why separating our personal domains can be useful.

Exploring our own digital shadow

• We can explore our digital shadow with Trace My Shadow – https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow – a tool launched by the Tactical Technology Collective together with a website that offers a lot of tips on how to protect our privacy and control our digital shadow: https://myshadow.org
• Identifying and materializing social networks across our online and physical activities: John Fass, researcher and designer at the Royal College of Art created activities to materialize our social networks and browser history [insert link].
• Seeing through the eyes of our mobile phone. Installing and playing with openpath.cc: some of our apps can see the same things. Read the Terms of Service carefully and explore if you can change the access settings in your phone. On an iPhone we can change the permissions for each app under its privacy setting.

Strategies of obfuscating our digital shadow

Digital shadows are constructed by the data we and others actively and passively give away. These shadows are used to log our activities and interests on a regular basis by several entities and analysed for profiling us as users and consumers as well as for the sake of surveillance. However, profiling is not limited to commercial companies or governments. As vocal women, most of all if we write about traditionally male-oriented topics such as IT, politics or gaming, it is the publicly available traces we leave behind that expose us to online harassment. Our digital shadows and threat of online harassment should not make us less vocal, and there are several measures we can take to increase our privacy and control our data. We can control the amount of data we give away by consciously stripping valuable information from content and metadata, we can try the art of self doxxing and think about ways to play and break up our online identity depending on our activities or networks.

Hiding parts of our content and metadata

Data consist of content, metadata and noise. Let’s find out how we can partly influence what we give away in the first two. When we publish content on the web, it is always a good idea to ask ourselves if what we are posting is public or personal and who can have access to it. Even if the information is connected to a public event and not to our personal lives, the names we mention or the images we upload may turn out to be dots that can be connected to draw a picture about who we are, what we are doing, where we are doing it and so on. If we or our contacts are being targeted by people who are too curious for whatever reason, this could help them.

This does not mean that we should silence ourselves – by taking some easy precautions and adjusting some details in our attitude towards the web and its services, we can limit our risks by increasing the level of the effort that would be required to attack us:

• When writing or posting images about public events in the web and in publicly accessible social network profiles, we should ask ourselves if the information we spread about single individuals, places and other details can be used to identify and/or attack someone. It is always a good idea to ask for permission to write about individuals and perhaps also to post information on public events only after they are finished.
• A good tool to anonymize faces in pictures that we take with our phone is ObscuraCam, a free camera application for Android devices, created by the Guardian Project, that has the ability to recognize and hide faces: https://guardianproject.info/apps/obscuracam
• When writing about personal details of our life, it’s better to use private profiles that can only be accessed by selected contacts (see Can we change our identities and our digital past? below). When using private profiles on commercial social media, we should be aware of the regular changes to the privacy policies. This can have an impact on how “private” our profiles are. There have been cases where privacy settings have been changed with updates to the privacy policies, exposing pictures, content and conversations of private groups.
• When giving our personal information to a web service, it’s best to check if they offer a secure connection (HTTPS instead of HTTP at the beginning of the URL – e.g. https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https) and to use that. If they don’t offer it or we don’t use it, this could expose us to attacks. For example someone could sniff our password and own our profile. A good solution to always use a secure connection (if available) without having to remember it is HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that encrypts our communications with many major websites: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
• We should use different passwords for each web service we use: if one of the services we access does not provide a secure connection, and we use the same password for stronger services too, someone who sniffs the password when we connect to a weak service may also access our accounts in stronger services and access private data we were trying to keep secret. Since passwords should also be strong to protect ourselves against bruteforce attacks, it’s a good idea to have them generated randomly and remembered by a password manager like KeePassX: https://www.keepassx.org. More information on how to create and manage strong passwords can be found in 3.2 Creating and using strong passwords.

Hiding some of the most telling metadata can be done by:

• Avoiding using our real name when registering a device or copies of software such as Microsoft Office, Open Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others. We can also switch off the GPS tracker in our phone or camera, but still other information is generated automatically.
• Some file types contain more metadata than others, so when publishing contents online we can change files from ones that contain a lot of metadata (such as .DOCs and .JPEGs for example) to ones that don’t (e.g. .TXTs and .PNGs), or we can use plain text.
• Another solution is to use programs that anonymize metadata like Metanull for Windows: https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-africa/metanull/windows
• Windows or MAC OS users can use programs such as Adobe Acrobat XI Pro (for which a trial version is available) to remove or edit the hidden data from PDF files. For GNU/Linux users, PDF MOD is a free and open source tool to edit and remove metadata from PDF files. However, it doesn’t remove the creation or modification time, and it also doesn’t remove the type of device used for creating the PDF. To learn more on metadata and their anonymization, visit: https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-mena/remove-metadata
• We can prevent tracking and collection of metadata through our browser by installing add ons like Privacy Badger or Adblock Plus and by changing our privacy settings and delete our cookies on a regular basis.
• Tor will hide specific metadata like our IP address, our digital address, and increase our anonimity online (see 3.3 Anonymizing tools).

Self-Doxing

Despite all the measures we may take now, the traces we left behind in the web in the past are still out there, and they can be used against us for tracking us down or for connecting the dots to expose our real identity and personal life (what is generally called “doxing”).

Doxing (also written as "doxxing", or "D0xing", a word derived from "Documents", or "Docx") is a technique that consists in tracing or gathering information about someone using sources that are freely available on the internet. This method is based purely on the ability of the attacker to recognize valuable information about their target and use this information to their benefit. It is also based around the idea that, as quoted in the Urban Dictionary, "The more you know about your target, the easier it will be to find his or her flaws”.

Harassers and stalkers use several tools and techniques to gather information about their targets, but since these tools and techniques are mostly public and easy to use, we can anticipate them and "self-dox" ourselves in order to make good, informed decisions about our online identity and activities. Of course, these same instruments can be used to learn more than is immediately obvious about someone we have met online before we give them our full trust.

Methods used for doxing range from exploring archives, yellow pages, phone directories and other possibly useful information made publicly available or from querying common search engines like Google or Duck Duck Go (https://duckduckgo.com), to looking for a person's profile in dedicated services, searching for information in public forums and mailing lists, or looking for images that the target has shared (and for instance may have also published in another, more personal, account). But it can also simply consist in looking up the public information on the owner of a website that is managed by the target through a simple "whois search" (see 4.5 Creating a site of one’s own).

We can use these same tools to explore what can be easily found out about us, but before we start exploring these web services and looking for our digital self, a good idea is to use anonymization tools like Torbrowser (see 3.3 Anonymizing tools).

• Many hints on how to self-dox oneself are available here: https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=93870
• To learn more about (self-)doxxing tools and techniques, visit: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gathering-information-to-assess-risk
• A nice (and creepy!) tool to learn what traces we have left behind in our Facebook account is Ubisoft’s Digital Shadow, a Facebook app which illustrates what third parties can know about us through our Facebook profiles: https://digitalshadow.com

Can we change our identities and our digital past?

‘Once something is on the internet it will stay on the internet, as the internet does not forget’. There is a truth in this. We may think that deleting certain sensitive data from social networks and web services may be enough to protect ourselves, but metadata cannot be deleted as easily (or, often, visualized, for that matter) and therefore it is much better to commit a virtual suicide by eliminating the old identity and creating a new one or, better, several new ones for each of our personal domains.

Every identity should be deleted or abandoned whenever we feel it necessary. Using just one identity in our whole life, in all the different work and leisure domains we cross, creates a bulk of information that could be used to profile or attack us.

When we create our new identities, we should select their contacts more carefully for each one and avoid sharing contacts with our other identities we use for different activities, so as to effectively create separate personal domains, with separate accounts, mail addresses, browser profiles, apps, and possibly devices. It can also be a good idea to create disposable identities for new acquaintances – introductory profiles we can use to get to know somebody before we include them in a more trusted network.

• To learn more about how to separate different identities into separate profiles, read “4. Managing various online identities” below.

Mapping our social domains

When we decide to keep our social domains and identities separate, the first thing we should do is examine our digital activities in order to map our several small-world networks and identify the ones that expose us most to cross-domain attacks. We can do this by observing our various activities and contacts and reflect on the worst-case scenario that could be caused by a loss of data. The answers we give ourselves will help us understand if a certain domain is sensitive or not and to separate the domains that are sensitive from those that are not.

But partitioning one’s digital life into security domains is certainly not an easy process and requires some thinking. Joanna Rutkowska, a Polish computer security researcher, has developed Qubes OS (see below), a security-oriented Linux distribution based on the concept of “security by isolation” (see 6.3 Security by isolation: Qubes OS), where each personal domain is isolated in a separate virtual machine. In her blog, Rutkowska describes how she has divided her domains to increase the security of her computer, and while her scheme is quite sophisticated and focused on her operating system, it can give interesting insights to anyone who wants to start isolating their several domains in order to enhance their security.

The three basic domains Rutkowska has identified are “work”, “personal”, and “red” (for doing all the untrusted, insensitive things).

• The work domain is where she has access to her work email, where she keeps her work PGP keys, where she prepares reports, slides, papers, etc, but she also has a less trusted “work-pub” domain for other work-related tasks that require some web access, such as accepting LinkedIn invites, or downloading cool pictures for her presentations. Furthermore, she has isolated other work activities in a “work-admin” and a “work-blog” domain in order to obtain a further level of security when managing her company’s servers and when writing on her blog or on other work-related web services.
• The personal domain is of course the domain where all her non-work related stuff, such as personal email and calendar, holiday photos, videos, etc., are held. Rutkowska says that she is not into into social networking, but if she was, she would probably access the social networks through a secure (HTTPS) connection. Also for her personal life, Rutkowska has decided to create a special domain called “very-personal”, which she uses for the communication with her partner when she is away from home. The couple uses encrypted mails to communicate, and Rutkowska has separate PGP keys for this purpose: while they don’t discuss any secret and sensitive stuff there, they still prefer to keep their intimate conversations very private.
• The red domain, on the other hand, is totally untrusted: this is where disposable profiles belong, because a domain dedicated to untrusted activities can get compromised easily and it should be possible to replace it with a different one. Basically, Rutkowska uses this domain to do everything that doesn’t fit into other domains, and which doesn’t require her to provide any sensitive information.
• Besides these three main domains, Rutkowska has several other separate domains. One is dedicated to shopping, for accessing all the internet e-commerce sites. Basically what defines this domain is access to her credit card numbers and her personal address (for shipping). Then there is the vault domain, the ultimately trusted place where she generates and keeps all her passwords (using KeePassX) and master GPG keys. Finally, she has a domain for all the Qubes development (qubes-dev), one for accounting, and another one for work archives.

Of course we don’t have to separate our domains in such a complex way, and, as we will see, using Qubes Os to keep them separated is just one solution – that moreover requires a powerful machine to run on. Yet Joanna Rutkowska’s reflections on domain mapping can be an enlightening starting point to analyse our activities and to separate our social domains to enhance our security.

• Joanna Rutkowska’s article on security domains can be found here: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html

2. Assessing risks and potentials: how to choose which online identity fits our purpose

"Real" or virtual identity?

Once we have identified our different personal domains and the digital activities and contacts that go with them, what we need to do is decide if we want to differentiate our identities accordingly or if we'd rather stick to our official name and true face for each of them. Someone may want to keep their work related to their legal or "real" identity, or think that their activism should remain anonymous, but this is not an automatic choice and it should be pondered carefully.

For instance, a journalist who finds it convenient to write online with her real identity may decide to stay in contact with her personal domain through a nickname, so that nobody can connect the two spheres together. On the other hand, if an activist decides that she wants to use a pseudonym for her activities online, she should consider that she will show her face in all her connected activities in the real world, such as speaking at a conference or participating in a demonstration, and this could help possible attackers to link her nickname to pictures of her face that are linked to her real name in social networks.

In assessing which identity to use in a given circumstance, it's helpful to consider the following questions that take into account both legal and personal risks to one's livelihood and safety:

• Would my job or livelihood be at risk if my identity were known in this context?

• Would my mental health or stability be affected if my participation in X were known?

• Am I able and willing to maintain separate identities safely?

• Would my safety be at risk if my identity in this context were known?

• Would my identity becoming known in this context cause harm to my family or other loved ones?

Once we have assessed our risk, we can then consider different strategies for separating our identities online. 

For more on assessing risk, visit: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/introduction-threat-modeling  

Strategies for separating identities online

Many strategies have been adopted by women who are active online, ranging from full transparency to full anonymity. For example, writer Kate Harding has written about her decision to start writing under her real name; in doing so, she dismisses the recommendations that are generally given to bloggers, such as: “writing under a pseudonym, making that pseudonym male or gender-neutral if you’re one of them lady bloggers, disabling anonymous comments, masking one’s personal information, being circumspect about publishing identifying details, and not writing anything that might inflame the crazies”. Instead of putting responsibility on women, Harding argues, problems of harassment should be handled by society as a whole and by men, who should understand that only by supporting women and their right to be active and vocal in the internet will anything change. And while she admits that “the only reason I haven’t yet heard I’m a worthless cunt who deserves to be raped is that nobody knows I exist yet,” she also acknowledges that this decision is “dangerous because I use my real name and especially dangerous because it’s a female name”.

In "The Girl's Guide to Staying Safe Online," Sady Doyle writes that becoming visible "creates a specific vulnerability" and offers a cynical set of recommendations for women to consider when writing publicly:

1. "Don't post the wrong photo. Any photo."
2. "Don't have the wrong name. Any name."
3. "Don't be good at your job."
4. "Every photo is the wrong photo. Every name is the wrong name. Any kind of good is too good. Don't go it alone."

While Doyle's comments are meant ironically, the fact is that women are disproportionately targeted by hate speech and harassment online. While our first reaction may be to step out of the public eye or censor ourselves, we have other options. Giving up on our online activities is exactly what misogynists and harassers expect from us, as this webcomic by Gabby Schulz exemplifies. Ultimately, Doyle concludes, “the best way to ‘stay safe’ online may simply be to stay online. After all: If there’s no one left willing to complain about the harassment, what are the odds that it’s going to change?”

As such, we have several options available to us: We can attempt to participate online anonymously. We can use a persistent pseudonym.  We can identify fully with our real or legal name, or we can divide our online lives, using our real or legal name sometimes and a pseudonym at other times. The following section will explore the pros and cons of each option, so we can determine which options are best for each one of us.

Anonymity

Total anonymity can be both isolating and difficult to maintain, but is useful in settings where we don't need to gain other people's trust, when there are few or no people we can trust, or when we don't want to expose others in our life to risks. Anonymity may be a good choice in certain specific situations, such as researching or participating in message boards about health issues, or when sharing sensitive information. We may wish to set up a one-time account to comment on a blog or news site, or a one-time email account or chat session for discussing sensitive information with others.

Vani, a human rights activist, speaks of their participation on social networks anonymously, saying: “I am a regular social network user. I voice my opinions on a range of topics. But I remain faceless and nameless”. While anonymity is a good option in many situations, it can also be dangerous in some countries, where it can signal to the state police that the authors think they are doing something wrong. This strategy can also be lonely: “Anonymity also isolates you”, a blogger writes. “Can you have a network to protect you and also be anonymous at the same time? Would visibility be a better strategy for you?”

Anonymity differs from persistent pseudonymity in that, while one may use a pseudonym while anonymous, that name is not persistent across different networks and may be for single use only. For more information on how to be anonymous online, see 3.3 Anonymizing tools.

Persistent Pseudonymity

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a pseudonym as "a fictitious name, especially one used by an author." In the age of the Internet, a pseudonym may also be referred to as a "nickname" or "handle", though the latter can also be tied to a person's legal identity. 

In a blog post for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian C. York writes: "There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with. They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture."

Pseudonymous speech has played a critical role throughout history, York explains. "From the literary efforts of George Eliot and Mark Twain to the explicitly political advocacy of Publius in the Federalist Papers or Junius' letters to the Public Advertiser in 18th century London, people have contributed strongly to public debate under pseudonyms and continue to do so to this day."

A pseudonym can be name-shaped (e.g., "Jane Doe") or not. Some websites, including Facebook, require that users utilize their "authentic identity," which typically means using one's legal name or the name by which they are commonly known. This policy has caused some users, such as a group of drag performers in California, to lose their Facebook accounts. Therefore, if we choose to use a pseudonym on social networks, it is important to understand that a risk of doing so is being reported for using a "fake name" and having one's account deleted. A strategy for avoiding that is using a name-shaped pseudonym.

Persistent pseudonymity also offers us visibility. Visibility allows us to network with others, and by pinning our voice to a particular name we can develop an online reputation. An online reputation allows others to decide whether we are worthy of trust, and is therefore a crucial aspect in trust-based online communities. Reputation can be developed by consistently using a nickname or pseudonym that can either be connected to our legal identity, or not. The choice to connect our online reputation to our "real" name should be taken individually, according to needs and context. 

It is also possible to maintain multiple pseudonyms (and reputations) for different purposes. For example, a person involved in the gaming community and LGBTQ rights activism may wish to maintain separate identities for each purpose, and can build trust within each community separately doing so.

Collective Identity

One way to preserve anonymity is through collective participation. This could mean any number of things, from a private group or mailing list that puts out collective statements to a shared Twitter account. While the same security concerns apply, working from behind a collective identity means having the power of the crowd behind you and can be a good option for those who don't wish to reveal their identities. 

Whatever choice we make, what matters is that we keep our domains effectively separated and that no matter how many domains we identify in our digital life and identities we create, in the internet every identity, even the one bearing our true name, becomes a “virtual” persona and should be managed carefully. 

The pros and cons of the various identity options:

[N.B.: The above chart should remain intact, but I would like to incorporate the following text additions somehow and don't really know how]

Real name

                                 Risk: The risks to using one's real name online are apparent. Using your "real world" identity online means that you are easily identifiable by family members, colleagues, and others and that personal activities can be linked back to your identity.

Reputation: Using your real name can have benefits, as it allows others to easily identify you, and allows you to more easily gain reputation and trust.

Effort: Using your real name requires little effort.

Total anonymity 

         Risk: Total anonymity can be beneficial at times, but can also be very difficult to maintain. Choose this option carefully.

Reputation: Maintaining anonymity means few opportunities to gain trust and reputation, or to network with others.

Effort: Maintaining anonymity is difficult and requires caution and, possibly, the use of anonymization tools (see 3.3 Anonymizing tools).

Persistent pseudonymity

Risk: One major risk to using a pseudonym for some activities is that it could be linked to our real world identity.

Reputation: A persistent pseudonym that others can use to identify us across platforms is a good way to gain reputation and trust.

Effort: Maintaining a persistent pseudonym requires some effort, particularly if we are doing so in addition to using our real name elsewhere.

Collective Identity

        Risk: One major risk to collective participation is the exposure of our real world identity.

Reputation: While not a way to gain individual reputation, one can still benefit from the reputation of the collective.                                                 

Effort: Although secure communications are still important, collective participation requires less effort than total anonymity.

4. Creating a new online identity

What’s in a name?

The practice of naming varies greatly from one culture to another. While names, in one form or another, have existed across cultures for milennia, the concept of a "legal name" is a fairly new one. Different countries regulate the practice of naming in different ways; for example, in Morocco, names must be chosen from a government-approved list, while in Germany a name must be clearly reflective of the baby's gender. On the Internet, companies that have implemented "real name" policies have often based their judgement on an individual's legal name, rather than allowing them to identify as they choose. This can be problematic, not only for individuals trying to remain anonymous, but also for transgender individuals, individuals with mononyms, and others.

As Jillian C. York writes: "Are legal names – usually the names given to us at birth – truly representative of our authentic selves? Surnames are a fairly modern phenomenon in many societies, required and in some cases even created by governments to keep track of citizens. Legal names allow government to track property ownership, collect taxes, maintain court records, and perform police work, among other things. With the advent of international travel, governments around the world standardized their practice, issuing passports that, in most cases, contain a first name and a surname."

Because of such restrictions, it can be beneficial to select a "name-shaped" name when choosing a pseudonym. If we want to use commercial social networks, it is better to use a credible name and surname rather than more imaginative ones. Many companies will require that we use both a first name and surname, or a name that doesn't contain any slang terms or profanities.

Writing our own story

An increasing number of psychologists argue that people living in modern societies give meaning to their lives by constructing and internalizing self-defining stories. In fact, the practice of “story telling” (and of creating a social mask, for that matter) is much older, and starting a new avatar with a story makes it a lot easier to maintain the role. We can  use a “known” person’s story, or a god or goddess, a superhero, a fictional character from our favourite novel, or adopt a “group identity” like Anonymous/Anonymiss or the Guerrilla Girls. Otherwise, if we feel particularly inspired, we can just invent a new story we like, but the main point is that when we create an identity we should conceive a whole virtual persona, an avatar that needs to be nurtured and developed in order to become credible, so it is better to start from the choice of our nickname.

This page offers a lot of cues and links for inventing a new identity: http://anonymissexpress.tumblr.com/post/117939311235/you-may-have-noticed

Having found a name, a surname, and a username we like for our virtual persona, and having generated or invented all the fake data we need for creating accounts with it, we should do thorough research, perhaps also using doxxing tools and techniques (see Self-Doxxing above) to find out if someone else is already using that name. After all, if we wish to develop our own reputation, we don’t want to be confused with someone else, especially if they don’t share our views of the world!

A credible persona

Technology isn’t everything, and now that we have chosen our favourite tools for securing our multiple identities, we should dedicate some time to imagination and impersonation.

A virtual persona cannot be just a name with a mail address and a series of web accounts. If we keep all our main identifying traits, such as our gender and job, our attitude or the way we write, we will leave the possibility open to connect the dots and identify our fake personas with our true selves.

One of the first things we should consider is for instance our linguistic fingerprint, which can be examined through a so-called stylometric analysis with tools that are increasingly usable, even for non-experts, and that make it possible to identify the author of a particular text. We can for instance give away our identity through our particular way of writing certain words, our typical typos and our style and tone. To change this, one of the first steps can be to use a spell-checker in our word processor in order to immediately visualize mistyped words. Besides, we could think of a different writing attitude. To keep it simple, we can adopt one simple rule for each persona, e.g. making hir shout by only using capital letters, or be a low-talker with hir lower-case style, or very excitable, with a lot of exclamation marks, or a spelling criminal, by always putting apostrophes in the wrong place or by mistyping words a lot more than we would normally do.

What we decide to do with our writing style should match with the character we choose for our new identity, which we should take some time to develop carefully. To be sure that our pseudonymous avatar cannot be tracked back to us, s/he should have a job that is different from ours but not so different that we don’t know anything about that field: s/he shouldn’t be a surgeon if we don’t know anything about anatomy! Similar considerations should be made to select hir skills and the main topics s/he focuses on and writes about, but since the point is to dedicate each of our personas to one particular domain of our digital life, it will likely be easy to make each of them experts in different, if slightly overlapping, fields. So for example a journalist who writes about national politics may have an alternative identity that talks about national politics as well, but only casually, while hir main interest is something completely different like IT or feminism.

As for the psychological attitude, a good rule of thumb is not to think up just a general character, but to give it further deepness by finding some weak spots for our personas, choosing them carefully among our psychological strengths so that, if the weak spot is attacked, we can safely weather the strikes and even have some fun in the process. For example, if we have a very strong sense of humour, we could choose a severe lack of humour as our alternative identity’s biggest weakness, so that if that weakness is under attack we can enjoy impersonating a humourless persona without really being harmed because our real weak spots are carefully hidden. For the same reason, we may decide to give our alternative identity some other kinds of weaknesses, like knowing nothing about mail encryption while in real life we are digital security nerds.

What is most important, though, is to remember that when we are in the internet each one of our identities, even the one connected to our true name, is a “virtual” identity, and it is always better to decide what character traits we want to expose in each of them, that is to say that creating a somewhat fictional character is a good idea even for our “true” online identity.

To read more about how to create a whole rounded character for our identities, visit this page: https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=94049

Virtual suicide?

If we decide to separate our domains, one of the first decisions we should make is whether to delete or keep using our existing identities. Let's assume for the sake of this discussion that we have chosen to use our real identity sometimes, and at other times, use different pseudonyms.

It is a good idea to consider each of our other identities as potentially disposable so that, in the case of it being compromised, it can be discarded easily. Before creating new identities, we should assess our existing ones and determine whether or not they are linked in any way to each other, or to our real identity. Remember that some of these connections can be tenuous: For example, did you sign up for a new, pseudonymous Gmail account using your real phone number? Follow the traces of each online identity to determine whether or not you should reuse, or discard them (to find out about methods and tools to follow your own traces, see 1.4 Exploring our own digital shadow and 1.7 Self-Doxing).

As we described before, however, when we use the Internet, we scatter our traces all over. Managing the traces that we have left behind over the years is a complex task, so if we're planning to embark on high-risk activities but still want to use our old identity or identities, it is a good idea to create new ones that have nothing to do with our existing identities and contacts.

There are a few ways to get rid of existing accounts:

• A nice tool to facilitate the process of deleting social network profiles is the Suicide Machine: http://suicidemachine.org/. Unfortunately, the Suicide Machine was forced to stop deleting Facebook accounts. Instructions on how to delete Facebook accounts are here: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
• AccountKiller – https://www.accountkiller.com, with instructions to remove accounts or public profiles on most popular websites
• JustDelete Me – http://justdelete.me, a directory of direct links to delete accounts from web services.

Disposable email and mail aliases

While some activities and social domains require some sort of identity management in order to gain a strong reputation and trust from other members of the community, in some cases all we need is a disposable email address that we only need to use once or few times, for example for opening an account in a fishy website. Even if we decide to just have one identity online, this is always a good practice that prevents sites from building a history of our activities and ensures that, even if that account gets compromised, we can simply delete it and create a new one, keeping our digital life unscathed.

Another option is to create a mail alias, a different email address that is connected to our main mailbox. The advantages of this approach are that this email account does not expire as disposable email addresses, and that if it gets compromised we can just dispose of it and create a new one, as with temporary mailboxes. But of course if the alias receives a lot of spam, it will fill our main mailbox.

There are many services that offer disposable email addresses. Some of the most privacy oriented are: https://anonbox.net, offered by the Chaos Computer Club, a historical hacker organization, and https://www.guerrillamail.com

In some cases, we don’t even need to create a disposable email account, because someone has already done this for us and shared the user name and password online. This is allowed by BugMeNot, a site – http://bugmenot.com – where anyone can publish their new account data for sites with free registration. And there is also a Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bugmenot

If we can’t be bothered with thinking up a new name and other data every time we want to create an account with a website we don’t really trust, https://fakena.me is a privacy-oriented fakename generator that provides all we may need, from a credible name and surname with birth date and (US-based) address to a user name and password, up to a link to the connected guerrillamail mailbox. Another similar service called Instant Internet Decoy – https://decoys.me – creates convincing but entirely fictional people who have birthdays, locations in several countries, families and even answers to common security questions.

While not every mail service allows users to create mail aliases, this service is offered to every mail user of Riseup (https://we.riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org), two secure, autonomous servers that are particularly focused on the right to privacy and anonymity and that are recommended for general security as well.

Creating a site of one’s own

Some of us may be content with the tools we have discussed so far, and writing in our social network accounts, especially if we have found a more privacy-friendly option (see 5.3 Alternative social networks), may be all we need to voice our opinions and to interact with a network of people (or with several networks, if we are using different identities when writing online). On the other hand, we may want a more independent platform to spread our ideas, plans or creations, and to do that we can create a website or a blog.

Creating a blog is as easy as signing up in a web service and choosing a name and a nice theme for our blog, and there are several blogging platforms around that are both user-friendly and free, like Wordpress.com. Equally based on the free and open-source blogging tool Wordpress, but with some tweaks for additional user privacy, there are two security-oriented platforms that are managed by autonomous servers: Autistici/Inventati’s (A/I) Noblogs – http://noblogs.org – and Nadir’s BlackBlogs – http://blackblogs.org. To open them, all that is needed is to have an email account hosted in an autonomous server (see https://www.autistici.org/en/links.html and https://blackblogs.org/policy respectively for a complete list).

All these platforms offer enough space for normal blogging activities and are very easy to use, but if we want to actively create our site from scratch, perhaps because we want a complex graphic layout or need to install particular tools that are not offered by Wordpress and its plugins, what we really should do is find some space in a server for our website and perhaps to associate it to our domain of choice.

• Webhosting services are many, but since they generally aren’t free, the options to stay completely anonymous are reduced to creating a website with A/I, which by default does not connect the users of its services with real identities. To learn more about Autistici/Inventati’s webhosting service, visit: https://www.autistici.org/en/services/website.html

If we want to have our own domain, bypassing payments and identifications may get difficult unless we use Bitcoin or another anonymous payment system, and the personal data we will provide will not only be stored in the registrar’s internal archives, but by default will also be recorded in a database that can be easily queried by anybody through a simple command (whois) or on several websites such as Gandi: Whois (https://www.gandi.net/whois). To avoid this, we can register our domain giving the data of an association and using a prepaid credit card that is not connected to our data (if available in our country), or else we can use a registrar like Gandi.net (https://www.gandi.net) that offers private domain registration for individuals whenever possible.

Managing our identities on social networks

When we use social network websites, we should always access them with a secure HTTPS connection. To do this consistently, it is best to install the HTTPS Everywhere extension in our browsers.

When creating a new account on a social network, we should use the browser profile we have created for the relevant identity, and check the privacy settings to be well aware of what we are making public, who can see what we post,who can contact us, who can look us up and what our contacts can do (for example tagging us in pictures or writing in our personal page).

We should also be very careful about the profile information we provide and about the profile picture and cover photo we use, because they are generally publicly available to anyone who looks for us in that social network even if they are not our contacts and regardless of our privacy settings.

Another crucial precaution is that our social network contacts do not overlap among our several identities, and that we don’t follow our account with other accounts associated to another identity. In particular, it is not a good idea to follow our pseudonymous accounts with our personal account: if someone is looking to unmask our anonymous identity, the first place they will look is whom the account follows, and who follows it back. For the same reason, we should avoid reposting posts or other content published by one account with another account.

Most social networking sites will display our location if possible. This function is generally provided when we use a GPS-enabled phone to interact with a social network, but we should not assume that this is not possible if we aren’t connecting from a mobile. The network our computer is connected to may also provide location data. The way to be safest about it is to double-check our settings. We should be particularly mindful of location settings on photo and video sharing sites, and not just assume that they are not sharing our location.

Photos and videos can also reveal a lot of information unintentionally. Many cameras will embed hidden data (metadata tags), that reveal the date, time and location of the photo, camera type, etc. Photo and video sharing sites may publish this information when we upload content to their sites.

If we use apps on mobile devices to access our social networks, it is better to use different apps for each account, so as not to post by mistake revealing contents with the wrong account. There are several apps to manage social networks: we just need to pick up one for each of our identities to reduce the risk of giving away our true identity.

Another trick to hide our trails is to publish from our various accounts at different times of the day. Some social networks, like Facebook, allow users to schedule the publication time of their posts, while for others, like Twitter, there are several apps that can do the job for us.

• To schedule a post on Facebook, read:https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635

• There are several apps to schedule a post on Twitter and other social networks, like Buffer – https://buffer.com – or Postcron https://postcron.com

Two further good hints for using social networks with multiple identities are to follow other people who could reasonably be considered the owners of our fake account, and to write (and hashtag on Twitter) posts about events that we are not attending, especially if they are taking place far away from us, to further distance our personal identity from our pseudonymous identities. It may also be fun to publish and then delete posts that look like we have exposed our identity, so as to further confuse anyone who may try to track us down.

Finally, whatever social network we decide to use, we should always read its terms of service to check if they suit our purposes well. And if we find them too complicated, we can check the website Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (https://tosdr.org), where terms of service of many social networks and web services are easily summarized for common mortals.

Alternative social networks

For the sheer number of their users, mainstream commercial social networks like Facebook or Twitter are extremely useful if our aim is to publicize as widely as possible an event we are organizing or a project we are launching. Nevertheless, when we advertise our initiatives, we should remember that these platforms have very strict terms of service that could justify their decision to terminate our accounts if they find that our contents infringe their rules (for more, read: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135175216204375.html)

Moreover, as is well known, with commercial social networks users are not the costumers, but the product, because they are profiled and sold to advertisers. If we add to this the ever-changing terms of service and policy and the interactions with other apps and features that make it very difficult to understand clearly what happens to our data, the best solution is to avoid commercial social networks as much as possible, and to limit their use to specific projects we want to publicize to a wide audience.

But social networks are not always profiling their users: there are alternatives that give much more freedom to their users and don't profile them.

On of these, Ello, explicitly states in its manifesto that “You are not a product” and has become famous, particularly in the trans* community, for not requiring real names, a rarity amongst commercial social networks. Consequently, its number of users has grown and this can be a good alternative to mainstream commercial social networks for achieving the critical mass of readers we need to spread our ideas and initiatives. Nevertheless, Ello is still a commercial project, and there are alternatives that are community-based, distributed rather than centralized, based on free and open-source software and privacy-friendly. Among these, Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com), Friendica (https://friendica.com) and Crabgrass (https://we.riseup.net) are especially worth mentioning.

Other similar sites may be popular in different regions, so we way wish to explore other options. Before choosing one, we should consider the following points:

• Does it provide connection over SSL (like HTTPS) for all uses of the site, rather than just during login? Are there no problems related to encryption, such as problems related to encryption certificates?
• How are your content and personal data treated in the End User Licence Agreement and Privacy Policy or Data Use Policy? With whom are they shared? For a useful add-on which helps users understand the Terms of Service of many popular sites, see Terms of Service; Didn't Read – https://tosdr.org
• What privacy options are provided for users? Can we choose to share our videos securely with a small number of individuals, or are they all public by default?
• Is the geographical location of the servers known? Under which territorial jurisdiction do they fall? Where is the company registered? How does this information relate to the privacy and security of our email activity and information?

5. Managing multiple online identities

A different profile for each persona

Now that we have created several identities, we need to keep them separate. While keeping notes on our identities might help ensure that we remember our story, there are technical measures we can take to make sure that our profiles aren't connected by someone unwittingly. It is important that we keep each profile separate in both our physical and digital lives.

A good start to separate our activities into domains is creating different browser profiles, mailboxes and social network accounts for each of our identities.

• To create multiple profiles with Firefox, visit: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles

• To create multiple profiles with Google Chrome, visit: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

When creating a new mailbox, it is always a good idea to connect to the server’s website with Torbrowser and, if a contact mail address is required, not to give one that is connected to another identity and to use a disposable email address instead (see 4.2 Disposable email and mail aliases).

A good rule of thumb is to always use different apps for each account/identity and, if possible, to separate our identities per device or operating system (see 6. A different machine for each identity)

6. Creating and maintaining a collective identity

Collective virtual personas

From General Ludd to Captain Swing, from the Guerrilla Girls to Luther Blissett to Anonymous, for centuries several groups and like-minded people have participated anonymously in historic protest movements or have created ground-breaking and provoking artworks or pranks attributing them to a collective pseudonym that, besides hiding their identity as individuals, has shrouded their feats in an aura of myth and almost magical power.

Several essays have been written on the topic, and the fascination of pseudonymity and shapeshifting has perhaps its roots in the dawn of humanity, but what counts is that we can choose to adopt a collective identity that already exists, like Anonymous/Anonymiss, or create a new one that we want to share with our own group or with the rest of the world.

• A very interesting study on multiple identities online is anthropologist Gabriella Coleman’s book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy. The Many Faces of Anonymous (2014), based on an anthropological research on how Anonymous has become a well-known and powerful collective identity with multiple faces and attitudes.

• In her PhD dissertation Networked Disruption. Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking (2011), Tatiana Bazzichelli also describes how multiple identities have been used to disrupt the fundamental notions of power and hegemony on which Western culture is based, and how this works in the web today.

Managing collective identities... or simple collective accounts

While the collaboration of many individuals can help creating a rich collective identity that is even more credible, given the many character traits we can think up with an enthusiastic, imaginative group of people, managing a collective project may have some further security and technological challenges we should keep in mind.

As we stressed above, security is a chain, and a single weak link can break the entire system. Therefore, our security and anonymity depend on the precautions each member of our group takes. We may decide that we don’t want to be absolutely anonymous, that our close friends can know about our collective activities, and the degree of security we may want to attain for our group depends on the possible threats we face and on our adversaries’ power and skills. Nonetheless, there are some important assets we would certainly not want to loose, like for instance the password to our collective mailbox or to our group’s social network accounts. Therefore, if we decide that we are going to share those passwords with the whole group, we’d better train each member on how to store a password securely or make sure that they have learnt the password by heart and don’t keep it on a post-it next to their desk at work (see 3.2 Creating and using strong passwords).

Whenever possible, we should try to use services that provide for different accounts and passwords. For example, instead of using a single mailbox for contact, we may create a mailing list that allows non-subscribed people to write to it and have all the members of the group subscribe to it, so that if someone writes to the group they can all read the e-mail in their own mailbox rather than in a collective one with a dangerously shared password. Similarly, if coordination really needs to happen through Facebook, it is much better to share information in a dedicated group rather than do everything within a collective account (which also risks to be deleted due to violation of the terms of service, see 2.3 Persistent Pseudonymity and 5.2 Managing our identities on social networks).

Mailing lists are also very useful for communicating among many people without having to add all the addresses every time we write a new email in the hidden recipients (Bcc) or, worse and more dangerous, in the visible addressees (To or CC) fields. Mailing lists are a versatile tools that is very user-friendly for those who subscribe (even if it requires some attention and basic knowledge on part of the list administrator). There are several services that offer mailing lists around the web, and we can open one or more also with autonomous servers Riseup (https://lists.riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org/en/services/lists.html – also offering a dedicated newsletter service for groups that want to send regular news to a high number of recipients).

To learn more about how to manage a collective mailing list as a safe space, read Chapter 3 in Part 2 of this booklet.

Another good tool for communicating with a group is the IRC chat, which has been used for a long time to coordinate projects online and is available in many different networks, likeFreenode (https://freenode.net) or Indymedia’s IRC network (http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/IrcHowTo) and Mufhd0, a network run by several autonomous servers including A/I (https://www.autistici.org/en/stuff/man_irc). The latter two also allow us to anonymize our connections through Tor (for more information on IRC chat, see 4.2 What is Internet Relay Chat (IRC)? in Part 2 of this booklet). this to step2

6. A different machine for each identity

If we use the same operating system for our several identities, no matter how carefully we separate our profiles, we can still make a human mistake, for example connecting to a pseudonymous account through the browser profile we have assigned to our true identity, or get infected by a malware that allows our attacker to monitor all we do online, with all our identities, and connect dots together.

Both risks can be limited by using a virtual machine for each of our domains, and by reserving yet another virtual machine to opening fishy attachments in order to avoid a malware infection.

As the name suggests, a virtual machine (VM) is basically a simulated computer with its own OS which runs as software on our physical computer. We can think of a VM as a computer within a computer. Installing and running a virtual machine is not very complicated, and there is very good documentation around. For our purposes of anonymization, the best available option is to install Virtualbox, an open-source, cross-platform virtual machine monitor (https://www.virtualbox.org), and to run Whonix in a virtual machine created with Virtualbox.

Whonix: compartmentalizing our identities through a secure virtual machine

Whonix (https://www.whonix.org) is an operating system that aims at protecting our anonymity, privacy and security by helping us use your applications anonymously. A web browser, IRC client, word processor and more come pre-configured with security in mind. It is a complete operating system designed to be used in a virtual machine. It is Free Software and based on Tor, Debian GNU/Linux and security by isolation.

Whonix’s website offers a wide documentation, ranging from very clear installation and usage instructions to thorough recommendations on security and the risks we may run: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation

Tails: a live system that leaves no traces

Using virtual machines, Whonix in particular, is a good idea if we have our own computer where we are free to install whatever we want, especially if it is a powerful machine. But if we use an older box or just connect to the internet from cybercafes, installing a virtual machine becomes unsustainable. In this case, we may turn to a live Linux distribution, a USB-stick with a Linux operating system installed on it that runs in the computer we are using as soon as we switch it on.

A particularly secure live distribution focused on security and anonymity is Tails, or The Amnesic Incognito Live System, a free and open-source Debian-based Linux distribution that can be started on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card and forces all its outgoing connections to go through Tor, blocking direct, non-anonymous connections.

When we launch Tails, we have a complete operating system that, just as Whonix, comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc. With Tails, we can access the internet, communicate, and do all we need anonymously and securely and, after the computer is shut down, the system will leave no traces on the machine unless we ask it to do so.

As with Torbrowser, it is not advisable to use the same Tails session to perform two tasks or endorse two contextual identities that we really want to keep separate from another, for example hiding our location to check our personal email and publishing a document on our pseudonymous blog.

The first reason is that Tor tends to reuse the same circuits, for example amongst a same browsing session, making it easier for a powerful adversary to correlate the several browsing requests as part of a same circuit and possibly made by a same user. Second, in case of a security hole or a misuse in using Tails or one of its applications, information about our session could be leaked. That could reveal that the same person was behind the various actions made during the session.

The solution to both threats is to shut down and restart Tails every time we are using a new identity.

Security by isolation: Qubes OS

There are three approaches to digital security: the first one is security by obscurity, which is based on encryption, strong passwords and similar measures and acts as a first line of defence, as a deterrent that will discourage random attacks but is not likely to stop someone who is directly targeting us; then there is security by correctness, whereby software developers try to get rid of bugs that make their code vulnerable. But modern software is very complex, and it is almost impossible to do this job perfectly. Therefore, the most pessimistic, and realistic, approach is security by isolation, which gives for granted that security measures can be vulnerable and focuses on harm reduction by stopping possible attackers from accessing the whole system that we want to secure.

In order to implement security by isolation, for instance, Whonix is divided into two parts: Whonix-Workstation, which is the system we access for our work, and Whonix-Gateway, which routes all internet traffic through Tor and, by being isolated from the workstation, averts many threats posed by malware, misbehaving applications, and user error.

But while Whonix needs a virtual machine to run on and its main focus is anonymization, there is an operating system that has security by isolation as its main purpose and that can make life a lot easier to someone who manages several social domains and/or identities in her digital life.

Called Qubes OS – https://www.qubes-os.org – and developed by computer security researcher Joanna Rutkowska, Qubes is a free and open-source security-oriented operating system based on Fedora, a Linux distribution, and Xen, a virtual machine monitor (or hypervisor), that allows us to separate the various parts of our digital life into securely isolated virtual machines. Qubes keeps the things we do on our computer securely isolated in these different VMs so that if one virtual machine gets compromised, the other won’t be affected. This way, we can do everything on a single physical computer without having to worry that one successful cyberattack harms our whole system, potentially revealing all the connections among our several identities.

A plus of Qubes OS for the purposes of multiple identities management is its user-friendly window manager, that assigns a different colour to each domain. Thus, the colour of the frame makes each window clearly recognizable as belonging to the domain corresponding to that colour and prevents potential human mistakes in the management of our identities.

Tails, Whonix, Qubes OS: how to choose

The three tools we have described in the last few paragraphs – Whonix, Tails and Qubes OS – all allow us to use a completely separate operating system for managing our alternate identities, and can be quite useful to make sure that we don’t reveal our true identity while we use the anonymous one(s). Still better, if we can afford it, would be to have a different machine for each of our identities, as well as an air-gapped one to store our most sensitive data. Of course, the choice depends on the resources we can dedicate to securing our digital life and on our threat-model, especially on the adversaries we expect to face: if we are pretty sure that in our country harassers work together with the regime to slander (or worse) people like us, we may want to be absolutely sure that none of our data is leaked and – if we have enough funds or are connected to a network of hacktivists – we may decide to ask for an expert’s help to check that we have taken all the necessary measures to keep doing an efficient work and to stop any ill-intentioned actors from tampering with our data. On the other hand, if we feel sufficiently protected by our community and/or by our government, and we expect our adversaries not to be very skilled in technological matters, perhaps all we need is to separate our browser profiles and mailboxes, to use a secure HTTPS connection and some basic common sense and to keep developing a network of support for vocal women online.

If we think that using a different operating system is really necessary, or that it can be helpful to keep things logically and graphically separated (or we just want to explore all the possibilities we have for the fun of it!), we should assess our resources and our needs in order to identify the best solution for us.

Comparison between Tails, Whonix and Qubes Os:

As we can see in the table above, Tails just needs a normal computer and a DVD or a bootable device to launch the system, but installing the system in this device, as well as having the DVD, USB stick or SD card actually boot in the computer we are using, can be tricky, and we may need some external help. After that, though, using Tails is pretty easy, and if what we need to do with our alternate persona needs a focus on anonymization, then it may be worthwhile to overcome the initial obstacle. Tails is a good option also if we have few resources, if we don’t have a computer of our own, or if we often use computers at internet cafes and want to be safer. One particular advantage of Tails is that after we have switched the computer off, we leave no traces and everything we have done vanishes into thin air. But if on the other hand we need persistence, i.e. we want to keep some files we have created or downloaded in our USB stick or we have changed some system settings and want to keep them also in the future, we need to enable this option when we start the system. Last but not least, Tails is an established, respected project that has been developed for many years and is used by a wide community of people.

If what we need is both anonymity and security by isolation and we have a good machine – https://www.whonix.org/wiki/System_Requirements – where we can run Virtualbox, installing Whonix in one or more virtual machines, according to the number of our alternative identities, seems a good solution that caters to all our needs and also offers an excellent documentation: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation. Nevertheless, Whonix, like Qubes Os, is a relatively recent project and the community using it is still rather small.

Qubes OS is a good choice if we want to keep all our activities inside our own computer without having to install anything else and if what we are trying to do is to effectively separate our identities rather than anonymize our activities in the web. It requires a very powerful computer – http://qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements – and this can be a hindrance, but if we feel that we really need to protect ourselves against possible cyberattacks, the investment may be worth its while.

To sum up, none of these tools protects us from every threat, and we shouldn’t look at them as a magic potion that will make us invulnerable. Nevertheless, by using any of them, according to our needs and resources, we will raise the level of effort that an attacker will need to harm us, thus making an attack less likely.

For a wider comparison among these and other systems, go to: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others