Gmail plugin enables tracking when and where you open your email.

A Stranger Can Find Out Where You Are By Getting You To Open An Email - On The Media

The ability to use remotely loaded images in HTML emails for tracking has been known for years, but perhaps not widely known.

The On The Media: TLDR podcast just re-surfaced the issue in the above article, where they talk about a free Gmail plugin called Streak, which provides this capability.

It automatically embeds the hidden images in emails you send, then lets you see when and even where the recipient opens them.

Because they appear to use IP address based locations, you can block the “where” part by using Anonymizer Universal.

You can block this tracking completely by turning off the loading of images in your emails. Of course, if you then choose to load images, know that you are also enabling tracking. If you block image loading you will also find that your email become much less attractive and significantly more difficult to read.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.

The Privacy Blog Podcast – Ep.11: Lavabit & Silent Circle Shutdown, Hoarding Bitcoins, and “Spy” Trash Cans in London

Welcome to Episode 11 of The Privacy Blog Podcast, brought to you by Anonymizer. In this episode, I’ll discuss the shutdown of secure email services by Lavabit and Silent Circle. In addition, we’ll dive into the problem with hoarding Bitcoins and how you can protect yourself while using the increasingly popular online currency. Lastly, I’ll chat about whether teens actually care about online privacy and an ad agency’s shocking decision to use high-tech trash cans to measure Wi-Fi signals in London.

Please leave any questions or feedback in the comments section. Thanks for listening.

Lavabit and Silent Mail shutdowns

There has been a lot of chatter about implications of first Lavabit and then Silent Circle's Silent Mail being shut down by their operators.

In both cases, it appears that there was information visible to the services which could be compelled by search warrants, court orders, or national security letters.

I want to assure Anonymizer users that we have no such information about Anonymizer Universal users that could be compelled. While we know who our customers are, for billing purposes, we have no information at all about what they do.

This has been tested many times, under many different kinds of court orders, and no user activity information has ever been provided, or could be provided.

Will a warrent be required to access your email.

Email Privacy Hearing Set To Go Before The House On Tuesday | WebProNews

The House Judiciary Committee is going to be discussing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. There is a chance that they will strengthen it.

This act was written decades ago, before there were any real cloud solutions. Email was downloaded by your email client, and immediately deleted from the server. They law assumed that any email left on a server more than 180 days had been abandoned, and so no warrant was required for law enforcement to obtain it.

These days, with services like gmail, we tend to keep our email on the servers for years, with no thought that it has been abandoned. Law enforcement is opposing reforms of this law because it would make their work more difficult. Doubtless it would, as does almost any civil liberty.

Earlier this month Zoe Lofgren introduced the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection act, amending ECPA. It would require a warrant to obtain cell phone location information. There is clearly some momentum for reform.

The Privacy Blog Podcast - Ep.1: Security of Online Accounts and Nyms User Tips

Welcome to Anonymizer’s inaugural episode of The Privacy Podcast. Each month, we'll be posting a new episode focusing on security, privacy, and tips to protect you online. Today, I talk about non-technical ways your online accounts can be compromised, focusing on email address and password reuse, security questions, and using credit card numbers as security tokens. In part two, I give power user tips for getting the most out of your Anonymizer Nyms account.

Hope you enjoy the first episode in our monthly series of podcasts. Please leave feedback and questions in the comments section of this post.

Download the transcript here

Facebook tries to force you to use their email

Forbs recently noticed that Facebook suddenly and basically without warning made @facebook.com your default visible email address on your timeline.

I had no idea that such an email address even existed! I certainly don't check it explicitly. Emails to that address end up in your standard Facebook messages queue, which for me is mostly a black hole.

LifeHacker has a nice article on how to change the settings back to how you might want them.

You may not want some spammer to get that address and start filling up your Facebook messages queue.

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Bruce Schneier on the real world effectiveness of a very simple domain name based man in the middle attack.

Here is a Wired article on the same issue showing how it was used to steal 20 GB of email from a Fortune 500 company.

Using Language Patterns to Pierce Anonymity

Thanks to Bruce Schneier for linking to this interesting article on using patterns in language to identify the author of emails. While the technique would not allow them to identify your anonymous emails in an ocean of others, that is rarely the real world threat scenario.

In many cases there is a relative hand full of likely authors of a given email or group of emails. It is often possible to gather large samples of emails known and acknowledged to be from the likely authors. In that case this technique has a small group of targets and excellent training materials which allow for very high levels of accuracy (the authors of the paper claim 80% - 90%). That is probably enough to get a warrant to search your home and computers.

Unless you have been unusually careful, the gig is probably up by then. Remember, this might not be for criminal matters. It many cases this would come up in whistle blowing or other non-criminal situations.

Reader question on privacy software

A reader of this blog recently emailed me to ask:

What s/w do you recommend to keep anonymous while using Gmail, IE, Outlook, and Facebook on a laptop?

This is actually a very tricky question because the nature of all of these tools, except Internet Explorer (IE), is to be associated with a visible and discoverable account and identity in the "cloud". I will discuss IE last and separately.

Gmail ties to your gmail and other Google accounts. Outlook ties to some existing email account at some email provider. Facebook is tied to your Facebook account and is explicitly designed for making your information public.

The profound question here is, what do we even mean by being anonymous using these services? I would argue that the best one can manage is to be pseudonymous; that is to maintain a persistent and visible pseudonym / alias which, while discoverable, is not associated with your true identity.

Fortunately Gmail and Facebook are free and typically do not require any real credentials to set up an account, and many of the free email providers work similarly. Using Anonymizer Universal (AU), and a browser with no history or cache to set up the accounts would ensure they were not connected to your real identity. It is important that the accounts never be accessed in any way except through AU, or they will be forever after associated with your real IP address. Furthermore, it is critical that the browser used is never used for any activity connected to your real identity, or the cookies and other digital detritus in your browser may allow these sites (or other folks) to tie the pseudonym to your other real name accounts.

IE is in many ways the easiest because there is no underlying account, but all the same rules apply. You need to ensure that you isolate your anonymous or pseudonymous activity from your real name activity.

For all of this activity a virtual machine can be a very effective tool. For example, if you use a Mac you can use a virtual machine running Windows or Linux for all of your alias activities and use the normal operating system for your real name activities. Similar tools exist for other operating systems.

RIM averts BlackBerry ban in UAE | Security - CNET News

RIM averts BlackBerry ban in UAE | Security - CNET News The announcement provides very little information about what RIM did to avert the ban, whether they made significant changed (compromises) to their system, or whether the UAE blinked and backed down from the threatened ban.

Security of BlackBerry in question

There has been a lot of media coverage of the threats of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to shut down BlackBerry connectivity in their countries unless RIM (the maker of BlackBerry) introduces a back door so they can monitor communications. I have been following this story closely, but wanted to wait until I had all the facts before blogging about it. At this point I don't think I am going to get the whole story. The statements I am seeing are absolutely contradictory and the whole thing is getting really fishy.

UAE/SA say that they need to be able to access BlackBerry communications, but they can't.

RIM says that their technology makes interception impossible because the communications are encrypted end to end between the BES server (located at the users place of business) and the handset. RIM claims not to have access to the decryption keys.

Third parties claim that RIM has arrangements with other countries (including the US and Russia) which allows such access.

RIM responds that this is false and that they don't have this ability.

It looks like RIM and UAE/SA will come to an agreement while both continue to claim that they have not compromised their positions.

The moral of this story is that you should not trust security you can not fully analyze yourself. Anonymizer Universal uses strongly encrypted L2TP VPN technology to secure your information so even if your telecommunications provider is cooperating with surveillance they still can't read the contents of your messages.

Unfortunately Anonymizer Universal does not support BlackBerry yet, but iPhone, Windows, and Mac users are protected.

Google "Street View" vans intercepted sensitive data

Cnet (among others) reports on Google's interception of personal information from open WiFi nodes, including passwords and e-mail.

Clearly it was poor practice for Google to be capturing and recording such information as they drove around, but the real news should be that the information was there to be captured. The intent of the monitoring of WiFi seems to be collecting the locations of WiFi base stations to improve enhanced GPS location services. This works by having your device upload a list of all the WiFi base stations it can see (along with signal strength) which the service then looks up in a database to determine your location. This requires the service to have a database of the physical location of an enormous number of WiFi base stations.

To do this, all Google would have needed to capture was the hardware address of each device. Instead they captured some of the actual data being sent back and forth as well.

It turns out that this is incredibly easy. With many of the WiFi chipsets built in to personal computers, laptops and USB adapters, one can easily download free software that will start intercepting open WiFi traffic with a single click.

The shocking news should not be that Google accidentally got this information but that anyone with bad intent could do it to you. Anonymizer will soon be releasing a video we did a few weeks back showing how someone could take control of your Facebook account using an open WiFi and almost no technical expertise at all.

If the connection between you and a website, email server, or other service is un-encrypted, then anyone near you can intercept it if you are using an open WiFi.

To be clear, open WiFi means that the underlying connection is un-encrypted. Many public WiFi sites have a login page. This is to manage usage, and provides no security to you at all.

If you get a connection before you type in a password, especially if you see a web page before you type a password, then you should assume you are on an insecure connection and therefor vulnerable.

Question from a long time customer

A long time customer recently sent in the following question. Since it should be of broad interest, I asked his permission to anonymous post and answer it here.

How do you know that subscribing to an anonymizer does not simply mark you for observation? We all know the NSA is capable of intercepting any electronic communication, and with gajillions of electronic communications happening every second, how would the NSA (or the FBI or the CIA or whoever it is who watches us) know which of those communications to watch? Seems like the people wanting anonymity would be the first on the list. Surely they COULD, couldn't they? That is, get the subscriber lists, which would enable them to intercept communications this side of the proxy - i.e., intercept on the way out, on the way TO the proxy, BEFORE it gets securely tunneled? And no, that would not be possible with the web, but it would with email. Supposedly. This is what has been proposed to me. What do you think? Does it have any validity?

It is certainly the case that the government could, in principle, monitor your access to privacy services. As long as that access is over a strongly encrypted connection, the contents of your communication, what sites you are visiting or who you are communicating with would be protected. The strength of your anonymity is then largely determined by the number of other users of the same service with which your traffic is being mixed.

In the United States, the use of privacy tools is not restricted. Strict separation of intelligence from law enforcement functions should prevent drift net monitoring of your use of Anonymizer from leading to any kind of legal investigation. The huge number of Anonymizer subscribers would also make this difficult and highly visible.

Outside of the US it is another story. Many countries exercise much greater control over the Internet. Even if it were not blocked by the Iranian government, accessing the Anonymizer website from within Iran would be a risky activity. Once again, the key here is safety in numbers. We have run anti-censorship tools in Iran that supported over 100,000 users. With those numbers, it is awkward for the government to go after people simply for using the service. This is not to say that if you are already under observation for some other reason that it would not give them added ammunition. Privacy tools are generally very effective at keeping you below the radar, but can be much less effective once you are on the radar for whatever reason.

The reality is that there is no evidence of widespread Internet surveillance being used in the US to track users of privacy services. As long as the connection to the service is well encrypted, you should be fine.

Sarah Palin email hacker

There have been a lot of articles lately talking about the fact that the person who hacked in to Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account used "an anonymizer". The articles also say that the privacy provided was compromised. The unfortunate misuse of Anonymizer's registered trademark has created some confusion. The person who hacked the account used a privacy service, but not one connected in any way to Anonymizer Inc.

Does the Fifth Amendment Protect the Refusal to Reveal Computer Passwords? In a Dubious Ruling, A Vermont Magistrate Judge Says Yes

FindLaw's Writ - Colb: Does the Fifth Amendment Protect the Refusal to Reveal Computer Passwords? In a Dubious Ruling, A Vermont Magistrate Judge Says YesThis case raises some interesting questions about using cryptography. Not the usual ones about technical attacks, but about how strong crpyto behaves in court. In general, if someone finds an encrypted volume on your computer, is that prima fascia evidence of illegal materials and thus probable cause? Suppose it was called “my plans to kill the president”? In this particular case the defendant actually showed law enforcement people the contents of the encrypted directory, and the files located therein clearly indicated illegal content. That would seem to be his big mistake. The prosecutors are not guessing about the files in there, they know what is there already, and just want access.At the end of the day, the defendant can always decide if the punishment for contempt for not revealing the password is worse than the punishment for what will be found inside. If the contents are really bad, he is best off resisting. I can’t see anyone doing 20 years in jail to compel production of the password.Of course, in that amount of time, computers may be fast enough that brute forcing the password may be trivial. This is a real concern if the statute of limitations for your crime is very long or there is no limitation.

Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail

Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail

It appears that Hushmail was able to turn over cleartext emails to the government when presented with a court order. This points out the importance of understanding the security model of the security tool you are using. For example, secure web pages (SSL protected) only protect the data as it moves between your browser and the remote web server. It does nothing at all to protect the data once it arrives.

Incorrect assumptions about a security model can lead you to take actions that you might not otherwise. This can put you at significant risk. Many solutions are very robust against specific threats while offering no protection at all against other threats. Understanding what is and is not protected by a solution is critical BEFORE you actually start to use it to protect important information.

Yahoo scolded for helping China imprison dissident - MSN Money

Yahoo scolded for helping China imprison dissident - MSN Money Yahoo! was taken to task in a congressional hearing for handing over information to the Chinese government that lead to the imprisonment of a dissident reporter. There is certainly much that could be said about standing up to oppressive governments and the risks of locating infrastructure in such countries.

I think one of the most important lessons to take away is to take more personal responsibility for your own security and privacy. Information collected by the services we all use is archived almost indefinitely. Today the problem may be China, but who knows which government may turn oppressive over the next 10 years. Even the US government has a history of witch hunts.

Internet users must be proactive about their security. Tools exist to enable people in China to use the Internet freely without any censorship or monitoring. Anonymizer provides such a service free to Chinese users. A number of other organizations do the same. Encryption, anonymity, and privacy tools can largely de-claw the modern police state, but only if they are used consistently.