Go ahead, DOJ. TRY to track my Google searches!

Because of recent news about the US Department of Justice's subpoena of Google, I've decided to get all kooky and learn more about surfing the net anonymously. I'm not a tin-foil hat kind of guy, but in the past few years I've become at least a little more interested in learning about how to protect my privacy. Thanks for that, Dubya.

First of all, so-called "anonymous proxies" are bunk. Don't use anonymous proxies! Many exist simply to allow bypassing the filters you may have at work or school (so you can browse Fark by going to a different site, for instance), and these pass your IP along to the server you're trying to reach. Using them, your search for "explosive terrorist teens" is still tied to your IP address. Many are, or could be used as, phishing scams. You have no idea what the proxy is logging. Many are in countries with no privacy protections at all (worse protections than in the United States, in other words), and those that are on American soil are just as vulnerable to DOJ subpoenas as Google is. You can be sure that Joe Hacker will bend to the pressure a lot quicker than Google has.

Enter Tor and Privoxy.

Tor is "The Onion Router" and Privoxy is a service you use to connect through Tor. I won't go into all the technical details, but you can find a lot about it at the link above, as well as at Wikipedia. I will say that it DOES work and that it is easy to set up.

When using Tor WhatIsMyIp.com reports that I am currently surfing from somewhere in Brazil.
GRC.com (the ShieldsUp guy) no longer sees me as a Shaw Cable subscriber.
Sites can be very nearly as fast to load as they ever were.
As an added bonus, Privoxy also acts as an ad blocker. It's catching ads that Opera normally lets slip through.

Excellent!

Tor traffic is routed through many different machines, and your data will occasionally pass through a slow one. In that case you will notice a drop in bandwidth. It can be a crap shoot. For now, it's the price you pay for (semi-)anonymity.

Unless you are a tin-foil hat wearer, you probably won't want to use this solution full time. And if you're that worried about your privacy you should also turn off Java and reject all cookies. Note the warning when you first installed Tor: "This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity." If you're trading nuclear secrets then Tor isn't for you.

Tip: Typing the following will get you a new Tor server if things are way too slow.

sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart

On the bright side, if you're a Firefox user there is a plugin called SwitchProxy that lets you quickly toggle between anonymous and normal surfing. (I haven't checked if there's anything similar for Opera yet.)

Most of the steps to get Tor/Privoxy running under Ubuntu are listed at the site.

Step 1 is here, but replace the commands "apt-get update" and "apt-get install tor" with "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get install tor privoxy".

Steps 2, 3, 4 & (optionally) 5 are here.