Revision as of 16:59, 19 May 2015

1. Know 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 and communicating with people across the word. Unfortuntaly, the internet has also become a contentious space. There is a push back against people who speak up, question or challange the dominant discourse. These attacks by people also known as trolls can be very personal, as you, like everyone, is giving out very personal information about you on the internet. If you are planning to be active in the internet as a feminist or as a woman human rights defender – or if you already are and have suffered attacks by harassers or trolls, or just want to improve your defences against this kind of attacks – it’s a good idea to start from an assessment of your digital shadow and of your social networks that are spread across your online and physical activities. These two aspects can tell a very accurate story about you, think of who you are, were you live and hangout, what you are interested in and who your friends are. This can expose us to several threats and can look scary at first sight, as you will see in this booklet there are actually many strategies you can adopt and tools you can use in order to shape or control them and to obtain a greater security online.

What is a digital shadow?

Our digital shadows can be defined as the stories and pictures data tells 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 a shadow, which is something impalpable and temporary, our digital shadows grow continiously, are perminant 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 collected that compose of our profiles? 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 out name, location, contacts, pictures, messages, tweets, likes

have particular features that make them uniquely identifiable in the flow of data that travel across the web. This enables 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 photos from the latest protest we have covered, or coordinate the next action with our group of activists.

In some cases, our data is collected without our ut also the browser we knowledge or consent – like when our browsing habits and IP address are collected while we visit a website. In other cases, we choose to hand over our data to third parties – when we share photos on Facebook, or book a flight ticket, for example. Through all such activity, we leave digital traces which result in the creation of our digital shadow.

When we use the Internet and/or mobile phones, we use digital services through networks. Our digital shadow exists within networks and that makes it vulnerable. In a network, data cannot travel directly from one device to another – it has to go through many other devices which make up the network. This means that all of our digital activity – such as sending an email, accessing a website or making a phone call – travels through multiple servers in a network until it reaches its final destination. The problem is that these third party actors can have access to our digital shadow in transit. 

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.

You can explore your 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

Indentifying and materializing social network across your online and physical activities. John Fass, researcher and designer at the Royal College of Art created activities to materialize your social networks and browser hisotry. [insert link]

Public and private traces

We may certainly find disagreeable that the traces we leave are logged on a regular basis by several entities and analysed for profiling us as users and consumers as well as for the sake of surveillance, and to better protect our privacy from this kind of actors there are several measures we can take.

To learn more about how our digital shadows can be used to profile and control us and about the tools we can use to protect ourselves, visit: https://myshadow.org But what exposes us to attacks online as vocal women – most of all if we write about traditionally male-oriented topics such as IT, politics or gaming – is the publicly available traces we leave behind, some of which we may be unaware of.

Data and metadata

When we publish contents in the web, it is always a good idea to ask ourselves if what we are posting is public or personal and where it is going to be accessible. 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. And 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 you take with your 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 “Our several small-world networks” below).

• 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) 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 your 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

But there is something else that might unwittingly give away information about us, an invisible but very important thing that is called metadata.

Metadata is information about data. a file (such as a word document, a PDF, a picture, music file etc.) that is stored within the file itself. This information can include the time and date a file was created, the username of the people who created or edited it, information about the device that created it, and other kinds of information. As a result of this, the metadata in a file could tell someone who created a file, on what computer or device, when, and in what location.

• Some of the most telling metadata can be hidden: for instance we can avoid using our real name when registering a device or copies of software such as Microsoft Office, Open Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others and we can 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 (.TXTs and .PNGs for example), 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, 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

Self-Doxxing

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 “doxxing”).

Harassers and stalkers use several tools and techniques to gather information about their targets, but since these tools and techniques are public and easy to use, we can anticipate them and self-doxx 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 you’ve met online before you give them your full trust.

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 you have left behind in your 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

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 personal domains, and each intersection among these domains can turn into a threat for our security. Each of these domains 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 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 profile 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 malware in our computer by having us download an infected proprietary game, because this network is not encrypted. But 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.

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 can only 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 a disposable identities for new acquaintances – an introductory profile you can use to get to know someone before you 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 several 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”, where each personal domain is isolated in a separate virtual machine. In her blog, Rutkowska describes how she has divided her domains, 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 and learning how to choose which online identity fits your 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 assign an identity to 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 side, 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. 

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 and help you determine which options are best for you.

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 the section on Anonymizing our connections.

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.

Effort: Maintaining anonymity is difficult and requires caution.

Persistent pseudonymity    

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

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

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

Collective Identity

        Risk: One major risk to collective participation is the exposure of your 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.

3. Create a new online identity

Virtual suicide?

When 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.

As we described before, 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 theprocess 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 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 your 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 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 both by 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 too.

What’s in a name

The practice of naming varies greatly from one culture to another. While names, in one form of 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 your 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 orderto 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!

4. Managing various online identities

Securing our multiple identities

Once we have chosen a name for our new identity, we can start creating a contact email, accounts with web services, and so on. Yet, separating our digital life into multiple identities is not enough. What we need to do is to keep them technically separated, that is to avoid that our identities scatter identical traces that can be linked together.

To do this, some precautions on the security side are definitely necessary, and to start, a good idea is to always hide our IP, the number that identifies our connections, through Tor, an anonymity network that conceals both the location of our connection and what we do in the internet. By consistently using Tor, no one can link our IP (and therefore our alternative identity) to us, not even the mail server we use. For further information on how to use Tor, see “Anonymization” below.

Also the choice of the mail server we use for our contact mail address is important. While there are several secure servers that offer a good service – e.g. the Swiss commercial service Kolab Now (https://kolabnow.com) and the autonomous servers Riseup (a site used by activists with a clear set of political principles: http://riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org) – the main point is to find a service that offers a secure connection (HTTPS instead of HTTP) and that is compatible with our virtual persona. If, for instance, we are creating an identity that doesn’t know much about digital security, it may be better to use a more widespread service like Gmail, and the possibility of two-factor authentication is always a plus. If the mail address we are creating is connected to our work and hosted by our firm’s mail server with its own domain, it is a good idea not to include our surname in the address and to keep just the name followed by the domain (e.g. jane@businessname.com). Of course, if a mail address is required when registering a new mail account, we shouldn’t give our usual address and it is much better to use a disposable account for this purpose.

Passwords

Managing passwords is also a crucial part of maintaining our identities and our security online. Using the same password over and over again is risky, as are passwords that connect us to our identit(ies). If we are using different identities, the number of our passwords will increase accordingly. There is no way to remember so many secure passwords unless we have some mental magic powers that allow us to memorize dozens of long random strings of letters, numbers and symbols. Since a password is only as secure as the least secure service where it's been used, it's good practice to maintain separate passwords for each of our accounts. For more information on the importance of strong passwords and how to store them, read Security in a Box's chapter on passwords. https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/passwords

To keep multiple secure passwords, you can use a password safe. KeePassX is a cross-platform free and open-source password manager that is very easy to use and creates files with passwords that can also be exported and used in other devices. It can generate random passwords and store them securely.

• To learn how to use KeePassX, read this how-to: https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/keepass/windows
• To learn how to use KeePassDroid, the correspondent tool for Android, read this how-to: https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/keepassdroid/android

But some passwords—like the one we use to decrypt our KeePassX file or lock our device—need to be easy to remember and strong at the same time. A good solution is to create passphrases that are formed by a random group of words that don’t make any sense together, separated by spaces. One way to do this is to use the Diceware techique (this requires six-sided dice and the Diceware word list: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/dicewarewordlist.pdf [PDF]. By rolling the dice five times, we will come up with a five-digit number that corresponds to a word on the Diceware word list; this word is the first word of our passphrase. If we repeat this at least six times, we can create a strong passphrase formed by six words that together make a strong, random passphrase. It can be memorized just as we did when we had to learn poems by heart at school and will be so long that it would take an average of 3500 years to crack it with brute force at a speed of one trillion guesses per second.

• To learn more about the Diceware technique, read this article published by Micah Lee in The Intercept: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/passphrases-can-memorize-attackers-cant-guess.

• To learn more about two-factor authentication and security questions, read Surveillance Self Defense's "Creating Strong Passwords": https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/creating-strong-passwords

A different profile for each persona

So now we have created several identities, but

but the risk that someoneconnects them together unwittingly or to harm us is still very highif we don’t take some simple precautions that can be summarized ina sentence: keep each profile apart from the others, both in yourdigital and physical life.

A good start to separate our activities into domains is creatingdifferent browser profiles, mailboxes and socialnetwork accounts for each of our identities.

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

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

When creating a new mailbox, itis always a good idea to connect to the server’s website withTorbrowser and, if a contact mail address is required, not togive one that is connected to another identity and to use adisposable email address instead.

A good rule of thumb is to always usedifferent apps for each account/identity and, if possible, to use adifferent profile in our computer or Android device or even different devices.

Managing multiple identities insocial networks

When we use social network websites, weshould always access them with a secure HTTPS connection. To do thisconsistently, 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 forthe relevant identity, and check the privacy settings to bewell 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 generallypublicly available to anyone who looks for us in that social networkeven if they are not our contacts and regardless of our privacysettings.

Anothercrucial precaution isthat our social network contacts do not overlap among our several identities, and that we don’tfollow our account with other accounts associated to anotheridentity. In particular, it is not a good idea to follow our pseudonymous accounts with our personal account: if someone is looking tounmask our anonymous identity, the first place they willlook is whom the account follows, and who follows it back. Forthe same reason, we should avoid reposting posts or other contentspublished by one account with another account.

Mostsocial networking sites will display our location ifpossible. Thisfunction is generally provided when we use a GPS-enabled phone tointeract with a social network, but we should not assume that this isnot possible if we aren’t connecting from a mobile. The network ourcomputer is connected to may also provide location data. The way tobe safest about it is to double-check our settings. Whe should beparticularly mindful of location settings on photo and video sharingsites, and not just assume that they are not sharing our location.

Photos and videos can also reveal alot of information unintentionally. Many cameras will embed hiddendata (metadata tags), that reveal the date, time and locationof the photo, camera type, etc. Photo and video sharing sites maypublish this information when we upload content to their sites.

If we use apps on mobile devices to access our social networks, it isbetter to use different apps for each account, so as not to post bymistake revealing contents with the wrong account. There are severalapps to manage social networks: we just need to pick up one for eachof our identities to reduce the risk of giving away our trueidentity.

Another trick to hide our trails is to publish from our variousaccounts at different times of the day. Some social networks, likeFacebook, allow users to schedule the publication time of theirposts, while for others, like Twitter, there are several apps thatcan 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 othersocial networks, like Buffer – https://buffer.com – or Postcronhttps://postcron.com

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

Finally, whatever social network you decide to use, always read its terms of service to check if they suit your purposes well. And if you find them too complicated, you 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 socialnetworks like Facebook or Twitter are extremely useful if our aim isto publicize as widely as possible an event we are organizing or aproject we are launching. Nevertheless, when we advertise ourinitiatives, we should remember that these platforms have very strictterms of service that could justify their decision to terminate ouraccounts if they find that our contents infringe their rules.

Moreover, as is well known, with commercial social networks users arenot the costumers, but the product, because they are profiled andsold to advertizers. If we add to this the ever-changing terms ofservice and policy and the interactions with other apps and featuresthat make it very difficult to understand clearly what happens to ourdata, the best solution is to avoid commercial social networks asmuch as possible, and to limit their use to specific projects we wantto publicize as much as possible.

But fortunately there are alternatives that give much more freedom totheir users and don’t profile them in any way.

On of these, Ello,explicitly states in its manifesto that “You are not aproduct” and has become famous, particularly inthe trans community, for not requiring real names while Facebookstarted to strictly implement its “real name” policy.Consequently, its number of users has grownand this can be a good alternative to mainstream commercial socialnetworks for achieving the critical mass of readers we need to spreadour ideas and initiatives. Nevertheless, Ello is still a commercialproject, and there are alternatives that are community-based,distributed rather than centralized, based on free and open-sourcesoftware 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 popularin different regions, so you way wish to explore other options.Before choosing one you 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?

• Read        the End User Licence Agreement and Privacy Policy or Data Use Policy        carefully. How are your content and personal data treated? With whom        are they shared? For a useful add-on which helps users undestand 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 you choose to share your        videos securely with a small number of individuals, or are they all        public by default?         

• Do you know        the geographical        location of the servers,        under which territorial jurisdiction they fall or where the company        is registered? Are you aware of how this information relates to the        privacy and security of your email activity and information?

Anonymizing our connections

As mentioned before, when browsing the internet through a normal connection, there are several traces that can give away our real identity even if we are using an alternate persona (most importantly our IP address) and there are several ways to intercept our communications, for example by sniffing our connection when we connect to the web through a free Wi-Fi spot, by accessing our ISP’s data or by monitoring the website we are using.

To add a further level of protection, we can decide to access the internet through a VPN, an encrypted tunnel that hides all services, protocols, and contents. Using a VPN is not difficult: it basically requires downloading a compressed file, extracting it and changing our computer’s connection settings, but it is important to choose a secure one – better if located abroad – because a compromised VPN server could be accessed by an intermediary who could then analyse all our activities. Autonomous servers Riseup – https://help.riseup.net/en/vpn – and Autistici/Inventati – https://vpn.autistici.org – both offer a reliable VPN.

But we should consider that from a technical standpoint VPNs have some limitations:

• An insecure connection is still insecure: Although a VPN will anonymize our location and protect us from surveillance from our ISP, once our data is securely routed through the VPN server, it will go out on the internet as it normally would. This means we should still use TLS when available (ie. (HTTPS to browse websites, pop-ssl/imaps/smtp-tls for mail exchange, and so on).

* VPNs are not a panacea: although they accomplish a lot, they can’t fix everything. For example, they cannot increase our security if our computer is already compromised with viruses or spyware. If we give personal information to a website, there is little that a VPN can do to maintain our anonymity with that website or its partners. For more information, see Riseup’s webpage on VPN anonymity: https://help.riseup.net/en/vpn/security-issues. * The connection might get slower: the VPN routes all our traffic through an encrypted connection to the server before it goes out onto the normal internet. This extra step can slow things down.

If what we need to do with our alternative identity only needs a browser, we might consider to use the Torbrowser rather than a different profile in our usual browser. The Torbrowser is a software tool designed to increase the privacy and security of our Internet activities and habits. It masks our identity and our on-line browsing from many forms of internet surveillance.

The Torbrowser Bundle consists of the Tor software and a modified version of the Firefox web browser, which is designed to provide extra protection while using it. To stop scripts from running without us knowing and to force secure SSL connections whenever available, the browser bundle also includes NoScript and HTTPS-Everywhere add-ons.

Tor protects our anonymity by routing communications through a distributed network of servers run by volunteers from all over the world. Using Tor hides the sites we visit from potential onlookers, and hides our location/identity from those sites. The software is designed also to make sure servers in the Tor network don't know both our location and the sites we are visiting.

Tor also takes steps to encrypt the communication to and through its network, but this measure cannot extend all the way to a website which is sending or receiving content over non-encrypted channels (i.e. not providing HTTPS access). Nevertheless, the advantage of using Tor when accessing such sites is that Tor can secure our communication up to the step between the last of the Tor servers and the non-secure site. This confines the chance to intercept the content to that last step.

As with VPNs, there is a trade-off between anonymity and speed. Because Tor facilitates anonymous browsing by bouncing our traffic through volunteers’ computers and servers in various parts of the world, it will definitely be slower than using other web browsers on our computer.

What we should remember when using the Torbrowser is that it makes us anonymous, but not private. Although our web requests are anonymous, if we are posting on Facebook or sending an email through Gmail, that activity is still identifiable as “us”. While this is acceptable if we are using the Torbrowser with our virtual persona, we should be careful not to use the same instance of the Torbrowser with more than one identity. If we want to browse the web anonymously with more than one identity, we can do so by creating each time a new identity for our browser, so that a new set of random Tor proxy servers is selected and we appear to come from a new location to the web servers. To do this, we just need to click the onion icon in the upper left of our browser and to select “New identity” from the menu. The Torbrowser will briefly close, clearing our browsing history and cookies and then restart. After that, we can safely browse the internet with a different identity.

Whonix: compartmentalizing our identities through a secure virtual machine

If we use the same operating system for our several identities, no matter how carefully we separate our different 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 (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. 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, if we really want to isolate them better.

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 computer, 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 side, 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 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 advice. 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. Furthermore, 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 in 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.

Finally, 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.

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

A site of one’s own... or a blog

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 “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 need to 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.

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 each of our personas should be dedicated 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

Collective virtual personas

From General Ludd to Captain Swing, from the Guerrilla Girls to Luther Blissett to Anonymous, 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, 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 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 that password 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.

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...).

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. They 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 "How to set up a Safe Space Mailing list?" 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, like Freenode (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.

Crabgrass: a social network for managing groups

But the most versatile tool for managing groups and collective projects is by all means https://we.riseup.net, a social network tailored specifically to meet the needs of bottom up grassroots organising that is based on the software libre web application Crabgrass and is hosted by the grassroots autonomous server Riseup.

Riseup’s Crabgrass platform offers both a secure HTTPS connection and encrypted data storage, and users and groups are free to choose what information they reveal about themselves. The offered tools include an email like messaging system for personal messages, public or private forums, wikis, task lists, decision making tools, a system for uploading and managing images, audio, and documents, and a customized home page where a group can list their event calendar, blog postings, and other public content.

Besides creating a common network among users, Crabgrass also allows group networking, as well as the possibility of creating subgroups and committees that correspond to the group’s organizational structure.

To learn more about the numerous possibilities offered by Crabgrass, visit the project’s page: https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about and read this howto: https://info.securityinabox.org/default/communities/01/crabgrass-online-collaboration