I feel like this is a hack that is rarely talked about. And it's the most reliable method I've found for getting an email account that I can use for signing up to other websites.
Imagine you want to create a completely anonymous account on some website. Most websites require an email account to sign up. if you're lucky you can use one of those a temporary email services, but many websites block those nowadays. They only accept trusted email providers like Gmail, Protonmail, etc. And trying to make an anonymous account on those providers is difficult. Even Protonmail, surprisingly. If you try to sign up for Protonmail using a VPN or Tor, they will ask for a phone number or a second email account. So now you have to get a phone number anonymously (very difficult), or get another email account anonymously, back to square one.
Darknet markets solve this problem. Pay a bit of Monero, and you get an account. Completely anonymous. Now I won't pretend it's easy. Even just signing up for a darknet market often requires learning how to PGP encrypt/decrypt messages. But it only takes an 30 min or so to figure it out and sign up, and it opens up a new world of tools to use for privacy. There are many other types of accounts that you can buy aside from Protonmail, and many other products in general that you can buy.
I don't get why Protonmail doesn't just accept anonymous crypto as an option during signup, but until they do this is honestly the most reliable option I've found. I really wish more websites just accepted crypto for account creation. It's understandable that in order to prevent spam accounts, account creation has to cost something, and crypto allows it to cost something without costing your privacy.
Anyways, here's a quick guide to get started. I'll avoid direct links since I don't know if those are allowed.
- install Tor Browser Bundle, and use it for the following steps
- search for websites like Daunt, Dread forums, and Tor Taxi. Darknet markets change all the time so use those websites to figure out which ones are currently active. Cross-check links across multiple websites to make sure they are trustworthy, since often scam websites will try to pose as legitimate ones
- look for markets that let you search for the product you're interested in before signing up, to save you time
- some markets require you to load funds into the market and then pay using those funds. Avoid loading more than you need, since some markets have "rugpulled" before (aka taken everybody's funds and disappeared. This is the risk of an anonymous market).
Edit: also if for some reason a seller doesn't accept Monero, you can use a crypto swap. Basically you send the swap service some Monero, tell them what crypto to convert it to (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), and where to send it to. Many can be used anonymously, without signup
Better the devil you know than one you don't. Physical methods involve too many unknowns, and chances are the people using them are overconfident, victims of dunning-kruger effect. The weaknesses of cryptography can be publicly studied. The blind spots in the surveillance network of your neighborhood are a big unknown. I've made enough security mistakes in the past to know that the biggest risk is the user, and the more you can offload to professional tools like Tor and Monero, the better.
It's not that simple. They have a rough idea of your location past on the post office box. They use surveillance footage to narrow down the list of suspects. They know that the suspect cares enough about privacy to mail cash to an email service. That's at most 1/1000 individuals. So in a city of a million residents, that's about 1000 people. Combined with surveillance footage, traffic cameras, and phone tracking to determine the movements of all citizens, as well as cameras around the post office box to get the height and build of the suspect, they can probably narrow it down to 5-10 people. Then they monitor those 5-10 people individually. Even using illegal methods like breaking in and installing mics, cameras, bugged hardware. Once they confirm who the suspect is, and find evidence, they use parallel construction to come up with some legal rational for how they found the evidence, hiding their illegal methods.
Imo targeted surveillance is game over. The enemy has magnitudes more resources on you, and you'll never even know that it's happening. The best you can do is avoid it in the first place. Hide amongst a million others, using Tor or Monero.
I agree about the devil you know vs the infinite possible future ones you don’t.
I think you’re making way too many assumptions about physical surveillance (“they know you care about privacy” as opposed to the actual thing they know, which is simply that you mailed a letter, being able to narrow your suspect list down based on the fact that they care about privacy, etc) but even if I were to take every single one of them at face value then the authorities have less information than is public on a bitcoin transaction (I know you’re a fan of monero, I’m using the amount of information in a bitcoin transaction here to make my point clear in the language of crypto). And they had to be looking when you did it.
I’m of the opposite opinion: digital surveillance is game over. The opponent still has orders of magnitude more resources than you, but they also have access to your entire communications chain via well documented backdoors, can apply millions of exploits on each piece of software or hardware involved in that chain, can literally directly translate those resources to faster and higher quality exploits and with hndl they don’t even have to be there when it happens. I think the best thing you can do is avoid the digital as much as possible.
I always used to laugh at my professors, friends and coworkers who were “revolver next to the fax machine in case it gets any funny ideas” types but a few decades around computer security done made me into a stereotype.
I should have been more specific. They are looking for somebody that mailed cash to an email service for account X. They know the mail came from postbox Y. They use surveillance footage and other factors to find the 10 people that used postbox Y that day. etc.
And yes the Monero blockchain is public, just like Tor traffic, but it's all encrypted.
Except with Tor and Monero, it's not them vs you, its them vs everybody using Tor and Monero. That's way harder. My point was that targeted surveillance is game over. Trying to break Monero is not a targeted attack. And the number of exploits on Tor and Monero are much more known than the number of exploits known for physical methods. You can look them up. Again, the fact that all this information is public is a good thing. It means security can improve over time. Hackers get better too, but if we look at history, in general computer security gets the upper hand over time. For example look at how hard it is to jailbreak an iPhone nowadays.
Physical methods is where there actually might be a million exploits. Nobody knows how secure they are, and anybody who claims to know is probably overconfident, with very little rigorous evidence.