How To Hide on the Internet Part 1

With all the news about the NSA spying on us, it almost seems negligent that I haven’t written this article yet. Understanding how you are tracked, and how to prevent it from happening are very important bits of information that precious few of us have a proper understanding of. As governments grow and become more intrusive, as technology becomes increasingly integral to our lives, these skills become more and more important by the day. Yet most of what we do on the internet makes no effort whatsoever at security, the majority of your communications have all the privacy of skywriting. Let’s change that a bit, shall we?

The goal of this article is to be brief and easy for the layman to understand. It assumes you are using Windows, but a lot of it will translate to Mac or Linux, it also assumes you have a basic understanding of downloading and opening files from the internet. It will give you a brief introduction to remaining anonymous on the internet, and provide you with some tools you can use to do so. It is not thorough, and it will not prepare you for a cyberwar with the United States Federal Government. It will however buy you some level of protection from prying eyes, taxpayer funded or otherwise, and that could save your job, your freedom, or even your life someday.