"... The police have neither the time, the manpower, or the motive to track down the "everyday citizen." 22-year-old Philip Markoff was a special case, with terrific local pressure to solve the multiple crimes."

While it is true that your local police are busy doing other things, the danger of IP tracking is very real. The simple fact is that unless you use very sophisticated IP and MAC address obfuscation techniques and you are extremely careful about using proxy servers and other tracking avoidance techniques, your computer's MAC and IP addresses will lead the police directly to your box if they have a reason to look for you. The FBI techniques mentioned in another comment, including key logger programs can and are used against even low-level criminals such as a teenager sending bomb threats to his school.

So, people need to understand that absent three-letter-agency immune HTBI level four+ lifestyles, everyone should assume as a matter of course that the police can, and are looking over your shoulder any time you log on to the internet and act accordingly. The techniques are so sophisticated, and even metropolitan PD's now have computer crime divisions (usually looking for kiddie porn purveyors) that tracking an IP and MAC address is a matter of punching a few buttons and making a couple of calls to an ISP.

It's worth repeating that Jack's methods are intended to give you greater PRIVACY, not conceal illegal activities. The most valuable part of Jack's recommendations is the mindset and lifestyle of protecting your privacy by being INVISIBLE. If they don't know you're there, they're unlikely to bother you.

As a former LEO, and before I became an LEO, I had a motto: "If you don't want the police to be interested in what you're doing, don't do things that the police find interesting." But the really important thing for those interested in privacy and liberty to keep track of is what, under contemporary conditions and government policy, the police find "interesting" enough to dedicate resources to investigating, which changes with the political winds.

That being said, I do have an interesting link to a module available for the Firefox web browser. It sends random queries to Google and other search engines to obfuscate your actual searches and reduce the ability of Google to create a useful user profile by creating search-engine "static" that renders their data aggregation useless. It does so in a way that keeps the search engines from classifying your IP address as a spam or DOS attack site. There is another module, called NoScript, available from the Mozilla (Firefox) add-ons site that allows you to block scripts on web sites. One script you can block is Google Analytics, which is their data aggregator. It also blocks web ads very nicely.

Submitted Link #1: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/...

The police are able to and will use these technologies to track down a criminal. But what would stop them from tracking the everyday citizen?

... The police have neither the time, the manpower, or the motive to track down the "everyday citizen." 22-year-old Philip Markoff was a special case, with terrific local pressure to solve the multiple crimes.

"Will be moving in the near future to a rural location without DSL or cable available, both of which I now use. If I rent a broom closet & keep my phone there with call forwarding to the new place, will the forwarding # be on AT&T records?"

Yes, I would think it would be.

"Can I include an old cleaned computer with DSL & use that via something like 'Go to my PC' while maintaining my privacy, using the PC in the broom closet like a remote terminal? "

I think it would be better for you to ditch the landline altogether. Get a data service via cellular telephone modem.

Find a cellular telephone carrier that provides service in you new rural home are. Some of them (I use Verizon) have good data-only plans using a cellular telephone modem that you insert into your PC or is already built into your laptop PC. If you are close enough to the towers, you can get relatively high-speed broadband service: not as fast as cable, but comparable to DSL. If you are too far from the towers, the data rate goes down. For about USD$80 per month, I get good enough data rates. Use your broom closet ghost address as a billing address, -- no need to tell the cellular telephone company your actual residence address!

Also look into the IronKey brand of hardware-encrypted flash drives. (See link below.) In fact, they are providing tonight (morning of April 21) a free upgrade to their application software. I can use my IronKey with its resident Firefox browser with my laptop and the Verizon "broadband" cellular service, and I can carry the IronKey with me if I wish to visit, say, a FedEx Kinko's and use the PCs they have there (at a ferocious price of about $1 per page for color printouts, and about $12/hour for using their computers). (Everything stored on the IronKey is encrtypted as you write to the IronKey and decrypted on-the-fly as you read from it.)

There's a lot to learn about computer security, but exploring the IronKey site can get you started.

Submitted Link #1: http://www.ironkey.com...

... (FYI, Hamish, $12 an hour at Kinko's is cheap. The Bellagio in Vegas charges $60 an hour ...)

Consider this situation: you have achieved the highest level of HTBI privacy possible but are NOT self-employed and live in the USA.

You are a sailor whose ship is captured by pirates and at the end of the incident are labelled a hero and returned to the USA. Or another situation occurs that brings you widespread notoriety of the good type.

Can you maintain your privacy amidst the press, cameras, neighbors, politicians, and 'hometowns' clamoring for you to appear for interviews, events, and parades? If so, how?

I am just wondering if all the best-laid plans of people like the captured and released sailors can thwarted and prevent a return to their private lives, assuming they had HTBI lifestyles.

... In the current case, it would have been impossible for Captain Richard Phillips to hide in the small town of Underhill, Vermont, population 2980. However, if one of the lesser crew members came from Los Angeles, had a common name, gave no interviews and avoided pictures, he might slip by.

AT&T is double charging me and won't admit it, the latest in a long line of transgressions. I will do just about anything to cancel my AT&T account, but I can't figure out how to live without a landline.

I am also considering moving out of the area and would love to hear if anyone has ideas about which cities/states in the Pacific Northwest are the most privacy friendly. I would be very grateful for any ideas you or your readers might have on these issues. Thank you.

Also, when you create an encrypted partition, you can disguise it with a filename that ends in .iso, .raw, .dat (for example), and an non obvious filename (as opoposed to say, "encrypted data"). None of this is foolproof but it's better than making it too easy for THEM.