5 ms·

What’s more remarkable to me is how people don’t see how easy it is to set up a clean surface identity and discrete secondary identities, and hide in plain sigh

What’s more remarkable to me is how people don’t see how easy it is to set up a clean surface identity and discrete secondary identities, and hide in plain sight.

Sevrene 9y ago
Depends on whom you're trying to hide from, no? Friends and family might have a hard time tracking your discrete secondary identities, but your ISP or facebook might see it very transparently.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  ...and police, intelligence agencies etc... will just flag that and your countermeasures will become a target.
- nine_k 9y ago
  A VM with a separate OS, talking to the world through a VPN would probably hide you from Facebook, Google, etc, in the sense that it would be hard for them to correlate the two identities. It of course won't work well against police, who can look up the VPN provider, ask who's paying for it, and it's mostly enough to find you.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    They will fingerprint your online presence timing, writing style, forums, audience, etc.
    - nine_k 9y ago
      Writing style: this is something you can work on. Forums: often the need for a separate identity arises from the need to join a particular forum frowned upon by your peers or superiors. Same for audience. That is, if you want a different persona and not a sock puppet to support your "main" persona. Timing: this is also solvable if you want to.
      - dogruck 9y ago
        At some point, following that logic, your multiple online personalities are truly distinct. For example, "okay, so you have one account exclusively post hard core right-wing arguments in the early morning, and then your second account posts left-wing arguments in the mid-afternoon." At that point, what's the point? :-)
        nine_k 9y ago
        For many people, the point is posting family photos and cat pics under their real name, for childhood friends and relatives, discussing technical details of some computer game in a slang-rich game forum, and maybe discussing hardcore [insert your favorite bogeyman here] on some forum of like-minded people. All these three personalities need not be connected in any way, nor need they contradict each other in what they say. They are just for different and unrelated facets of one's life.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      You never use multiple personas on a given forum. And you never have multiple public personas using the same language. Routine stuff, such as account management, is OK. Just use the provider's native language.
Zigurd 9y ago
You have put your finger on it. Lack of imagination is why intelligence agencies did not see Russia running influence campaigns on the same social media platforms security agencies use to target incompetent would-be terrorists for dumb stings. Hiding in plain sight is easy for a motivated and diligent adversary.
- KGIII 9y ago
  You appear to be assuming they didn't see it coming or know it was happening.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
How the hell do you intend to hide your secondary identities from the NSA and GCHQ? Even Tor is probably compromised. (Also, creating secondary identities is easy on paper, but IME segregating myself like that and presenting a fake persona takes a psychological toll. Perhaps others are more adept at it.)
- mirimir 9y ago
  I use nested VPN chains, minimum three deep. Plus Tor for anything serious. Maybe a VPN or two through that even. Latency starts to suck, but that's a good thing, really. Me, I enjoy having multiple personas :) I also enjoy writing about this stuff: https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-opsec-and-compartmentalization-part-1 https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-o...
  - Mtinie 9y ago
    Isn’t the most important rule of opsec, “don’t post comments about your opsec, even if you totally believe you are ‘safe’”?
    - mirimir 9y ago
      That's true. But Mirimir is a special case for me, because his role is sharing about OPSEC. And for what it's worth, Mirimir plays things quite safely. An adversary would need to work out Tor connections through other VPN chains to find anything I really care about. And even then, I'm totally white-hat, so hey.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    I’ve read your article and it makes sense, but I’m wondering if what you are doing with multiple personas is really any better. Mirimir is a rather unique name, Google turns up a lot of results which seem to be you, so it’s not hard to see what mirimir is interested in. I’d assume ad networks also have a pretty good profile on mirimir too. I’m sure there’s more to you than just mirimir, but it’s probably a big part of who you are so what does this really gain? Your real name isn’t revealed, but that’s just another persona. Potential employers won’t find you are interested in opsec through Google, but I’d assume you work in that field anyway. I’d guess having the choice of what to reveal is an advantage, but it’s very easy then to reveal too much so that personas could be put together (e.g. Steve who is the friend of another persona on Facebook, comments on mirimirs article). Maybe people aren’t going to come across your non-work interests in (e.g.) steampunk or painting dragon pictures, but so what? For most people that is part of who they are, and they don’t care to hide it. Maybe if you have something to hide this is a good idea, but I’d say most people don’t (given how many post private details of their life online). Personally I use my real name online. I’ve considered switching to pseudonyms to make it harder for casual people to stalk me, but at the end of the day I’ve already revealed so much that it’s not going to help much, and there isn’t anything I feel the need to hide.
pdkl95 9y ago
Dan Geer, CISO at In-Q-Tel, on[1] why this is patently incorrect: > Your digital exhaust is unique hence it identifies. Pooling everyone's digital exhaust also characterizes how you differ from normal. Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? [...] Privacy will be [...] the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. > Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your fused identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. Lest you think that this is a problem statement for the random paranoid individual alone, let me tell you that in the big-I Intelligence trade, crafting good cover is getting harder and harder and for the exact same reasons: misrepresentation is getting harder and harder. If I was running field operations I would not try to fabricate a complete digital identity, I'd "borrow" the identity of someone who had the characteristics that I needed for the case at hand. OPSEC is hard. You leak incredible amounts of data, and modern analysis techniques reveal a lot more than most people realize. Re: your secondary identity - how do you plan on obfuscating the changeover events so the usage times (and/or network entry/exit times) of your secondary identity are not the inverse of when you use your primary identity? I recommend ZOZ's talk "Don't fuck it up!"[2] for a better sense of just how hard is to do proper OPSEC in the modern age of surveillance. [1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8
- mirimir 9y ago
  Re secondary personas: They're all online simultaneously, more or less. Or at least, as needed.
e12e 9y ago
Right. You just need an actor to stand in pictures for consistant facial recognition. Occasionally send overlapping data (typing a message at one place, while writing a status in another) - all in consistent and different styles. Possible? Maybe. Easy? No.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Why do you need to have a face? You certainly don't use smartphones (or any device with a camera or microphone) with your alternate personas. I occasionally want a photo, but I just find something fun online. And about style. Mirimir only writes in English. I draw on my experience working with Americans, including many from the South. My meatspace identity never uses English online.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  I just tagged myself in a bunch of stock photos (with the same few models) to foil the algorithms. Haven't tested the effects since I've long disabled facial-recognition tagging in my profile, though. I suppose someday they might implement features to try to detect and filter out that kind of thing, but then it will time to abandon the platform totally.
  - e12e 9y ago
    There's no need for a data hoarder to rely on platform specific facial recognition - they'll presumably ingest all photos and tag/group them themselves. This of course includes images where you've been photographed in a group/public place. I imagine it's pretty trivial to "walk" from a single known-good photo (eg: booking / surveillance photo taken in connection to a "suspicious" public gathering, atm cctv, or where a person is figuring in the same photo as a known "person of interest") - to ~99.9% of all photos in the dataset...
bradknowles 9y ago
Easy for you, maybe. In this regard, you might well be one of the very few 0.000000001% for whom that statement might be true.
indubitable 9y ago
This is not as effective as you might think. We reveal so much more about ourselves than we could ever imagine. If you use, or used Reddit, Snoopsnoo [1] is a site that uses incredibly primitive language parsing to build a profile on users based on what they've voluntarily submitted. And again I have to emphasize that is using very primitive parsing. It's disconcerting how much we reveal when an algorithm is able to rapidly and effectively piece it together. Now when enter the government that data can be cross matched against other meta-data to nail down your identity to a very small segment, if not outright match it. And then we get into things like language analysis. I make some token effort to anonymity, but my wife has mentioned she often knows its me posting before seeing the username. And I can do the same for other people I know well. No idea what we're picking up on, but it's a task that machine learning would be phenomenally well suited to do - and do better than we do. And then there are things like more explicit dialect issues. This [2] is a quiz based on American dialects. Again it is phenomenal how much your vocabulary, which undoubtedly you view as 'proper', actually reveals your location. Our very language is not only a finger print but also a geo-tracker. [1] - https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ [2] - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/...
- keont 9y ago
  That link is frightening. Even though I think about this often, watching it in action is scary. Is there any similar tool for twitter?
- bobbinsbob 9y ago
  I'm British and took that survey for shits and giggles, I like a survey. Anyway I'm not that impressed it had me down as either coming from Providence (because I pronounce mary, marry and merry different), or Santa Rosa or San Jose (because I'd never heard of a drive through liquor store which actually seems a mental idea, from a UK perspective). I know it's not supposed to work on me but there's a massive distance between the first and last two places based solely on one data point. Makes me wonder how this would fare in a smaller country like the England or Scotland, etc.
- Jill_the_Pill 9y ago

What’s more remarkable to me is how people don’t see how easy it is to set up a clean surface identity and discrete secondary identities, and hide in plain sight.

Sevrene 9y ago

Depends on whom you're trying to hide from, no? Friends and family might have a hard time tracking your discrete secondary identities, but your ISP or facebook might see it very transparently.

QAPereo 9y ago
...and police, intelligence agencies etc... will just flag that and your countermeasures will become a target.
nine_k 9y ago
A VM with a separate OS, talking to the world through a VPN would probably hide you from Facebook, Google, etc, in the sense that it would be hard for them to correlate the two identities. It of course won't work well against police, who can look up the VPN provider, ask who's paying for it, and it's mostly enough to find you.
- dogruck 9y ago
  They will fingerprint your online presence timing, writing style, forums, audience, etc.
  - nine_k 9y ago
    Writing style: this is something you can work on. Forums: often the need for a separate identity arises from the need to join a particular forum frowned upon by your peers or superiors. Same for audience. That is, if you want a different persona and not a sock puppet to support your "main" persona. Timing: this is also solvable if you want to.
    - dogruck 9y ago
      At some point, following that logic, your multiple online personalities are truly distinct. For example, "okay, so you have one account exclusively post hard core right-wing arguments in the early morning, and then your second account posts left-wing arguments in the mid-afternoon." At that point, what's the point? :-)
      - nine_k 9y ago
        For many people, the point is posting family photos and cat pics under their real name, for childhood friends and relatives, discussing technical details of some computer game in a slang-rich game forum, and maybe discussing hardcore [insert your favorite bogeyman here] on some forum of like-minded people. All these three personalities need not be connected in any way, nor need they contradict each other in what they say. They are just for different and unrelated facets of one's life.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    You never use multiple personas on a given forum. And you never have multiple public personas using the same language. Routine stuff, such as account management, is OK. Just use the provider's native language.

Zigurd 9y ago

You have put your finger on it. Lack of imagination is why intelligence agencies did not see Russia running influence campaigns on the same social media platforms security agencies use to target incompetent would-be terrorists for dumb stings. Hiding in plain sight is easy for a motivated and diligent adversary.

KGIII 9y ago
You appear to be assuming they didn't see it coming or know it was happening.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

How the hell do you intend to hide your secondary identities from the NSA and GCHQ? Even Tor is probably compromised. (Also, creating secondary identities is easy on paper, but IME segregating myself like that and presenting a fake persona takes a psychological toll. Perhaps others are more adept at it.)

mirimir 9y ago
I use nested VPN chains, minimum three deep. Plus Tor for anything serious. Maybe a VPN or two through that even. Latency starts to suck, but that's a good thing, really. Me, I enjoy having multiple personas :) I also enjoy writing about this stuff: https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-opsec-and-compartmentalization-part-1 https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-o...
- Mtinie 9y ago
  Isn’t the most important rule of opsec, “don’t post comments about your opsec, even if you totally believe you are ‘safe’”?
  - mirimir 9y ago
    That's true. But Mirimir is a special case for me, because his role is sharing about OPSEC. And for what it's worth, Mirimir plays things quite safely. An adversary would need to work out Tor connections through other VPN chains to find anything I really care about. And even then, I'm totally white-hat, so hey.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  I’ve read your article and it makes sense, but I’m wondering if what you are doing with multiple personas is really any better. Mirimir is a rather unique name, Google turns up a lot of results which seem to be you, so it’s not hard to see what mirimir is interested in. I’d assume ad networks also have a pretty good profile on mirimir too. I’m sure there’s more to you than just mirimir, but it’s probably a big part of who you are so what does this really gain? Your real name isn’t revealed, but that’s just another persona. Potential employers won’t find you are interested in opsec through Google, but I’d assume you work in that field anyway. I’d guess having the choice of what to reveal is an advantage, but it’s very easy then to reveal too much so that personas could be put together (e.g. Steve who is the friend of another persona on Facebook, comments on mirimirs article). Maybe people aren’t going to come across your non-work interests in (e.g.) steampunk or painting dragon pictures, but so what? For most people that is part of who they are, and they don’t care to hide it. Maybe if you have something to hide this is a good idea, but I’d say most people don’t (given how many post private details of their life online). Personally I use my real name online. I’ve considered switching to pseudonyms to make it harder for casual people to stalk me, but at the end of the day I’ve already revealed so much that it’s not going to help much, and there isn’t anything I feel the need to hide.

pdkl95 9y ago

Dan Geer, CISO at In-Q-Tel, on[1] why this is patently incorrect: > Your digital exhaust is unique hence it identifies. Pooling everyone's digital exhaust also characterizes how you differ from normal. Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? [...] Privacy will be [...] the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. > Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your fused identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. Lest you think that this is a problem statement for the random paranoid individual alone, let me tell you that in the big-I Intelligence trade, crafting good cover is getting harder and harder and for the exact same reasons: misrepresentation is getting harder and harder. If I was running field operations I would not try to fabricate a complete digital identity, I'd "borrow" the identity of someone who had the characteristics that I needed for the case at hand. OPSEC is hard. You leak incredible amounts of data, and modern analysis techniques reveal a lot more than most people realize. Re: your secondary identity - how do you plan on obfuscating the changeover events so the usage times (and/or network entry/exit times) of your secondary identity are not the inverse of when you use your primary identity? I recommend ZOZ's talk "Don't fuck it up!"[2] for a better sense of just how hard is to do proper OPSEC in the modern age of surveillance. [1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8

mirimir 9y ago
Re secondary personas: They're all online simultaneously, more or less. Or at least, as needed.

e12e 9y ago

Right. You just need an actor to stand in pictures for consistant facial recognition. Occasionally send overlapping data (typing a message at one place, while writing a status in another) - all in consistent and different styles. Possible? Maybe. Easy? No.

mirimir 9y ago
Why do you need to have a face? You certainly don't use smartphones (or any device with a camera or microphone) with your alternate personas. I occasionally want a photo, but I just find something fun online. And about style. Mirimir only writes in English. I draw on my experience working with Americans, including many from the South. My meatspace identity never uses English online.
Chaebixi 9y ago
I just tagged myself in a bunch of stock photos (with the same few models) to foil the algorithms. Haven't tested the effects since I've long disabled facial-recognition tagging in my profile, though. I suppose someday they might implement features to try to detect and filter out that kind of thing, but then it will time to abandon the platform totally.
- e12e 9y ago
  There's no need for a data hoarder to rely on platform specific facial recognition - they'll presumably ingest all photos and tag/group them themselves. This of course includes images where you've been photographed in a group/public place. I imagine it's pretty trivial to "walk" from a single known-good photo (eg: booking / surveillance photo taken in connection to a "suspicious" public gathering, atm cctv, or where a person is figuring in the same photo as a known "person of interest") - to ~99.9% of all photos in the dataset...

bradknowles 9y ago

Easy for you, maybe. In this regard, you might well be one of the very few 0.000000001% for whom that statement might be true.

indubitable 9y ago

This is not as effective as you might think. We reveal so much more about ourselves than we could ever imagine. If you use, or used Reddit, Snoopsnoo [1] is a site that uses incredibly primitive language parsing to build a profile on users based on what they've voluntarily submitted. And again I have to emphasize that is using very primitive parsing. It's disconcerting how much we reveal when an algorithm is able to rapidly and effectively piece it together. Now when enter the government that data can be cross matched against other meta-data to nail down your identity to a very small segment, if not outright match it. And then we get into things like language analysis. I make some token effort to anonymity, but my wife has mentioned she often knows its me posting before seeing the username. And I can do the same for other people I know well. No idea what we're picking up on, but it's a task that machine learning would be phenomenally well suited to do - and do better than we do. And then there are things like more explicit dialect issues. This [2] is a quiz based on American dialects. Again it is phenomenal how much your vocabulary, which undoubtedly you view as 'proper', actually reveals your location. Our very language is not only a finger print but also a geo-tracker. [1] - https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ [2] - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/...

keont 9y ago
That link is frightening. Even though I think about this often, watching it in action is scary. Is there any similar tool for twitter?
bobbinsbob 9y ago
I'm British and took that survey for shits and giggles, I like a survey. Anyway I'm not that impressed it had me down as either coming from Providence (because I pronounce mary, marry and merry different), or Santa Rosa or San Jose (because I'd never heard of a drive through liquor store which actually seems a mental idea, from a UK perspective). I know it's not supposed to work on me but there's a massive distance between the first and last two places based solely on one data point. Makes me wonder how this would fare in a smaller country like the England or Scotland, etc.
Jill_the_Pill 9y ago