Rebel of the Week: Bill Rounds, Expert on Digital Anonyminity in a Statist World
January 5th, 2011
When I heard about HowtoVanish.com I immediately thought of the morose and beautiful . Whether or not Thom Yorke, Johhny Greenwood & Co. employ Bill Rounds’ methods of digital secrecy is still a mystery, but for his efforts at teaching people to maintain their privacy in an era of increasingly pervasive surveillance Bill Rounds is Silver Underground’s Rebel of the Week.
As his website says, “Bill Rounds, J.D. is a California attorney. He holds a degree in Accounting from the University of Utah and a law degree from California Western School of Law. He practices civil litigation, domestic and foreign business entity formation and transactions, criminal defense and privacy law. He is a strong advocate of personal and financial freedom and civil liberties.” In his spare time he creates resources to keep your private information out of the hands of both the state and invasive marketing campaigns; a practical application of libertarian principles in a movement that sometimes has too strong an affinity toward the esoteric.
A major emphasis for him is preserving the ability to surf online anonymously through the use of free and, preferably, subscription-based proxy servers/Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). This Silver Underground blogger occasionally uses the free VPN Hotspot Shield but is increasingly frustrated by the astronomical amounts of pop-ups one is subjected to for using the service. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch but I will soon be testing Mr. Rounds’ recommended software in the hopes of avoiding such annoyances. I also use Moxie Marlinspike’s Google Sharing with prevents Google from storing your IP address and cataloging your online behavior with Google.
If you’re a libertarian rebel maybe you care about people being able to see the amounts of pornography you consume, your financial information or the time you spend on subversive anti-government websites. If you aren’t overt and proud of your anti-state leanings but would rather maintain an air of secrecy about your political beliefs then Mr. Rounds’ work is a great start. You can still absorb the content you’d like to and comment anonymously all without your information being sucked into some government database so bureaucrats and agents can keep an eye on you.
There is already quite a bit of information about your online behavior in consumer databases, social networking sites and your internet service provider’s (ISP) records, which at this point are there to stay. The best you could do is to start now by being more private online through the help of our Rebel of the Week, Bill Rounds. Thank you for your fantastic and practical efforts for a free society!
(You may be inspired to go overboard like some of the folks in the new Cracked article, 6 Real People With Secret Identities Nobody Saw Coming.)
