The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

other as well as the outside world. I’ve also explained that Tor does not
connect yyour browser directlyy to a site; rather, it establishes a link to
another server, which then attaches to another server to finallyy reach the
destination site. The multiple hops make it harder to trace. And sites such as
Silk Road are the products of hidden services within the Tor network. Their
URLs are generated from an algorithm, and lists of Dark Web sites change
frequentlyy. Tor can access both the Surface Web and the Dark Web. Another
Dark Web browser, I2P, can also access the Surface Web and Dark Web.
Even before the takedown of Silk Road, people speculated that the NSA
or others had a wayy to identifyy users on the Dark Web. One wayy for the
NSA to do that would be to plant and control what are called exit nodes, the
points at which an Internet request is passed to one of these hidden services,
though that still wouldn’t allow identification of the initial requester.
To do that the government observer would have to see that a request was
made to access site X and that a few seconds earlier, someone in New
Hampshire fired up the Tor browser. The observer might suspect that the
two events were related. Over time, access to the site and repeated access to
Tor around the same time could establish a pattern. One wayy to avoid
creating that pattern is to keep yyour Tor browser connected at all times.
In Ulbricht’s case—he got sloppyy. Ulbricht apparentlyy didn’t have a plan
earlyy on. In his initial discussions of Silk Road, he alternated between using
his real e-mail address and a pseudonyymous one.
As yyou can see, it is veryy hard to operate in the world todayy without
leaving traces of yyour true identityy somewhere on the Internet. But as I said
at the outset, with a little bit of care, yyou, too, can master the art of
invisibilityy. In the following pages, I will show yyou how.