Onionize Your Online Life. I don’t even claim to understand how it works, but over the years, Internet geniuses have put together something called Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. What Tor actually does for you is dirt-simple and might be a relief to the nervous guy or gal on the run from a heap of troubles at home. Tor is free, downloadable software that that allows anyone who has it on their computer to do their work in complete and blessed anonymity. As best as I can understand, Tor’s network routes signals all over the world, until an Internet user’s identification and location have been completely obscured.
An argument in favor of getting your hands dirty with technical stuff and using Tor is pretty simple: criminals are really fond of it. All along I’ve assumed I’m talking to a mix of people—those fleeing legal woes and those who are just trying to get away from some kind of clear and present danger, which often involves terrible people (abusive spouses, creepy stalkers, people who compulsively suck their teeth in restaurants). Any of these would be well served by a software package that’s popular with online drug merchants, sellers of questionable documents (also relevant to our cause here!), and hackers themselves.
I’ve been told that Tor, sadly, isn’t perfect. Law enforcement and government agencies have learned in the last few years that if they park themselves at key points along Tor’s network, they may be able to identify some users.
However, knowing the way criminal justice enforcers prioritize what they do, I can almost guarantee that unless you are one seriously bad actor and your Internet habits are part of whatever files exist about you, chances are good they won’t have their bots hanging out looking for signs of you trying to anonymously purchase your favorite vintage train conductor overalls on eBay.
I began by instructing you, grasshopper: don’t tweet. I was serious about that. Listen, get your anonymity software. Set up a basic e-mail account that only receives, never sends. Go absolutely crazy with searching whatever you need to search to reassure yourself that whoever might be a little too curious about you is not actually on your trail, yet.
But let’s look at the temptation, the real snake in the garden of your new life free of old and possibly deadly entanglements. Temptation comes in the form of whatever social media venue tickles your attention-seeking fancy. If you are involved with social media when you realize it’s time to hightail it out of your old life, then I have some ugly reality for you: your new life needs to be about staying the hell off those accounts.
Why? Because we’re humans, and we are creatures of habit. I’m not just talking about consistently lusting for spicy mustard on our hot dogs, I’m talking about speech patterns. The way we actually construct sentences.
If you had a really popular social media account of some kind prior to bugging out and you did as instructed and let that drop, great. What you don’t want to give into is the impulse to start up something similar all over again, a lonely nobody this time, of course, but with the same unmistakable verbal flair. The Internet is full of intrepid amateur detectives who are spending their free time catching “catfish” and surfing the profiles of innocuous strangers.
Depending on how hard someone is searching for you, even your tendency to use the words “cromulent” and “perq” in casual conversation might trip you up. If you’re a highly prized fugitive for some reason—major bank robbery suspect, drug trafficker, and the like—federal investigators have a pretty deep bag of tricks to reach into, and it’s not crazy to think they could find you simply by analyzing anything you’ve posted on the Internet and then using tailored search strings to discover that mysterious nobody in Podunk, Idaho, who—wow, crazy coincidence—looks just like you.
The bottom line is this: keep the Internet shenanigans to the barest minimum possible. And when you have to do anything—it’s highly likely you still may have to conduct various financial activities over a computer, for example—hide behind whatever walls you can find. An unmonitored public computer you can type on with gloved hands, the Tor-obscured surfing software, whatever works.
It’s not all about computers and tablets though, is it? At some point, we have to talk to people. That’s a fact of life. So let’s go to church together, my friends. I’m about to induct you into…
I know that if you’ve been an avid consumer of detective novels, thrillers, cop dramas, you’ve heard of the burner phone. Just what the hell is a burner phone, after all, and is it even a real thing? Do you set it on fire after you use it? It’s real, and it could be your best friend. And you are not required to set it ablaze, no.
On a simple level, a burner phone is a prepaid cell purchased with cold, hard cash. No contract to worry about. You pick up some airtime cards (like what you’d buy to use a pay phone overseas), maybe $50 for a month, whatever the going rate is now, charge up the phone, and then use it for whatever.
It’s not fiction that our friends who society so judgmentally condemns as “the criminal element” are longtime users of burner phones. I have to admit, too, they are much more convenient than driving out to the last working pay phone wherever you live, if there even is an operable one anymore.
So, you’ve got a solid source of communication and even the cheapest phone probably has some basic ability to use the Internet—and then when you think the number may have run through one too many StingRay devices, just drop it in the trash as you’re exiting your local big box store with the box containing your next burner phone.
Of course, it’s wrong to assume a burner phone is only of use to those who want to keep phone calls related to their drug deals off their AT&T bill. The burner phone has completely—well, mostly—legitimate uses as well.
Acquiring funds is a continuing challenge, especially if the money you piled up to finance your life change was more molehill than mountain. It seems inevitable that before you can find some basic job in your new life, you might need to downsize. A pretty natural way of doing that these days might be some kind of anonymous ad on a Web site that specializes in classified postings.
What could be safer for something like that than a completely disposable phone number? Hell, you could put it right in the ad, in that case. Then once you’ve sold that pair of ski boots and the transaction is done, the phone number can conveniently flutter off to the dead phone number graveyard and your new pal won’t be able to invite you to tag along on any wintry adventures. Not to mention, no further hassles from the nosy, weird, or disgruntled buyers who found your posting a little too late.
Burner phones are incredibly useful to anyone on the dating scene, too. What better option to have at your disposal than a disposable phone if your new flame gets a little stalkerish? What if they suddenly realize you aren’t actually Kevin Costner or Jennifer Aniston’s hotter older sister? Flip that phone open and snap it right down the middle—there will no longer be a place for your suitor to file a complaint, and everyone can move on with their lives.
Burners are eminently practical solutions to a ton of problems. Coming back to how they might be relevant to our interests—well, you need to have some kind of phone number when applying for your low-key job in your new life, right? That’s a business application, in a way. Also, if you’re among that “criminal element” I mentioned before, you don’t really need me explaining burner benefits to you.