How to remain 100% anonymous on the internet?
- There is a geeky possibility to use a prepaid card (SIM) and connect it with a mobile HSDPA dongle i.e Huawei_E220 and also you can check the section Privacy rights and prepaid mobile phones for Prepaid Mobile Phone. If you buy everything without registering you can have access to the world wide web anonymously. Because this is a known problem against cyber crime and other criminal activities it is not allowed in some countries to use such an unregistered prepaid card.
- Another possibility is to use an open WI-Fi. For example in an internet café. The operating system must be available without any registration like Linux. The MAC-Adress of the Network-WiFi card in the computer which is visible in the WI-Fi network must be changed (this is easy possible in Linux)
- If you want to do some research about the Tor network you can try the Linux distribution Tails where everything is setup right (for example the flash player would use another channel which goes not through the Tor network.) Which means if you are using the flash player while browsing with Tor, the data packages for the flash-player will communicate with your real IP address and goes not through the Tor-nodes. Tails Webiste
With the current state of the interent and how it works (in my opinion) I do not think that it is possible at the moment. Tor (among other onion-routing services), while a good idea in theory, there are issues with exit nodes being compromised etc. Essentially, anything that accesses the 'normal' internet at any point could theoretically be traced back to you. Systems such as I2P while, inherently more anonymous, only allow access to material that is stored on the I2P network itself, so you would be a bit stuffed if you wanted to access random website.
With regards to cyber-criminals, a couple of things can happen with regards to them not being caught:
- They could be living in another country that has no extradition treaty with the country that the crime is being committed in (or countries that have little/nothing in the way of cybercrime law).
- If they have a reasonable level of computer knowledge, chances are they will be encrypting their disks, so even if they can be extradited/investigated/whatever, the chances of actually recovering any evidence from their machine(s) are next to nil.
I think Tor is probably the closest thing you can get to anonymity, but there is indeed a small risk to get exposed. Also don't forget that some criminals don't get caught because they route their traffic through multiple countries. When choosing the countries to route through they make sure they aren't friends with eachother. This makes it very difficult and will increase the time for the police to get information. (it's not because because they have access to some special anonymity network)