It’s one thing to set up an “anonymous” Twitter Hulk
account whose anonymity your friends and colleagues can’t pierce,
because the combination of your care not to tweet identifying details,
the stilted Hulk syntax, and your friends’ inability to surveil the
global internet and compel phone companies to give up their caller
records suffice for that purpose.
But as government whistleblowers set up “rogue” agency accounts
that send out information that the Trump administration has told them
to keep confidential, the scope of the tasks necessary to maintain
anonymity in the event that a state-level actor wants to unmask them
widens significantly.
Just to get started, you must have both an untraceable email account and
phone number. The Intercept’s Micah Lee steps through the process to
acquire both. You can get an email address from the likes of Sigaint or Riseup
and only access them via Tor browser, ideally after booting up into a
secure OS like Qubes, Tails or Whonix (note that merely searching for
information on running these OSes and browser can flag you as a suspicious individual, meaning all your communication will be intercepted and retained indefinitely).
But it’s a lot harder to get an anonymous phone number. You need to buy a
burner phone and SIM for cash, wait two weeks for the CCTV system in
the store to overwrite the video of the transaction, then activate your
phone far from home. Once you’ve used it to get a Twitter
account-creation authentication SMS (again, nowhere near your home or
office, and nowhere where there’s a record of you having traveled to),
you need to destroy both the phone and the SIM.
That’s just to set up the account! Once you’ve got an account up and
running, you need to prevent yourself from being identified by the
quirks of your writing-style, by being phished through links, by
tweeting information that only you know (possibly information that was
selectively provided to you in order to test whether you are the leak in
the system), by logging in without Tor browser, by uploading photos or
other metadata-rich media, etc.
Anonymity is hard, and when your adversary is a large, powerful government, it’s even harder.
Escapes from Apathy 