Anonymous Proxies - they don't hide you from the PTB

I've heard it on good authority from a friend who works for LEA that although they can hide you from hackers, etc, anonymous proxies or webtunnels offer no protection from government or LEA snooping. He wouldn't say any more than that, though/

Does anyone know 'how' government agencies can locate people even if they are using anon proxy servers?

Is there any way of remaining anonymous or are all our surfing habits like an open book to the PTB?

Personally, I don't use an anon proxy anyway, there's no real need to do, and it's way too much hassle when I've tried it in the past.



[edit on 6-6-2004 by harrisjohns]

they keep an IP record, of your IP (and everyone's) when you use the proxy, and gives the list to the gustapo on demand

Awesome, I see BeingWatched has read that book too...I wonder how many people know about these documents?

"And finally: any proxy server, especially a free proxy, keeps logs (reports) with detailed information on every IP sending requests to it as well as on the time of requests. So, any person or organization authorized to access this information can always find out what places in the web you have visited and what you did there, even if you use a chaining of 10 anonymous proxy servers located in different parts of the world."

www.freeproxy.ru...


ok, so you can delete logfiles of course ... but don't forget that information can be recovered from even pretty damaged files. You'll need to pass over that disk sector plenty of times to be even reasonably sure that the data has gone.

I'm interested in 'hiding' from l33t h4x0rz and advertising, but beyond that sort of casual level I don't believe that there is any real privacy online.

Most of them supposedly delete their records regularly, but if their after a high profile suspect I would expect they would furnish a log at the request of authorities. You also have to consider that some information gathering agencies create those servers for the purpose of catching people in their net.