How to stay out of prison and safe from the prying eyes of law enforcement, the MPAA, the RIAA, and other pesky P2P interlopers.
A user by the name of Ben has released a handy guide for members of the file-sharing community looking to stay safe and out of trouble.
He decided to make the guide after the recent raid on the BitTorrent tracker site OiNK’s servers and the subsequent arrest of the site’s admin, Alan Ellis, and the wiping of his servers.
“After this I’ve decided to release a torrent file with powerful erasing software, and privacy tools to keep the police out of your file-sharing/downloading business and keep downloaders and sharers out of prison,” he writes.
With the file-sharing community under increasing assault these days it seems, the guide couldn’t come at a better time. It never hurts to learn as much as you can about keeping your PC activities private, irregardless of their legitimacy. With some countries, particularly mine – the US, thinking it can apply its laws to sites and users in other countries where the ACTIVITY MAY BE PERFECTLY LEGAL, I can think of no better recourse than for everyone to make those efforts as difficult as possible.
I’ve also included a link both here and below that includes the .pdf from which this was taken as well as 5 different privacy and erasing tools.
Ben’s Guide to protecting File-Sharers from Going to Prison
LEGAL WARNING: THIS INFORMATION IS TO HELP PEOPLE/PROTECT PEOPLE, AND IT’S FREE AND I MAKE NO MONEY OFF OF IT. IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG, OR IF CRIMINALS USE THIS GUIDE, OR IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO YOUR COMPUTER BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T THINK TWICE AND BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE ERASING, OR DIDN’T THINK BEFORE YOU DO SOMETHING STUPID, YOU FOR ANY CRIMES BEING COMMITTED, PROMISE YOU WON’T HOLD ME(BEN), OR DISTRIBUTORS OF THIS GUIDE ACCOUNTABLE SINCE I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ERRORS, THINGS GOING WRONG, AND YOU PROMISE YOU WON’T SUE ME OR ARREST ME SINCE I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS.
Sorry for the caps, Just a warning to protect you and me. Also you agree to accept this legal agreement when downloading/reading this so you won’t hold me in court, since I don’t control peoples actions.
I have studied some law enforcement tactics and they cannot convict you if you have no evidence, such as erasing your computer then reinstalling the operating system and use it like you did before so when cops confiscate your Computers they have no evidence to convict you of copyright infringement.
They can kidnap British citizens, extradite file-sharers from Canada, and probably Mexico, but if your computers erased and you used firewalls when you shared they might not be able to convict you.
I also recommend you use your own open Wi-Fi so that the cops will think the file-sharers used your Wi-Fi, trying to not get caught and your record will be swept clean.
But here are the main valuable tips cops and lawyers wouldn’t want you to get:
1. Until you get a Subpoena you can erase/destroy the evidence, once you get a Subpoena if you attempt to destroy evidence you can get charged with Obstruction Of Justice and Tampering with evidence.
2. If your not accused of terrorism you cannot let police cops into your home until they have a search warrant. Always keep your computer away from your parents, family, roommates, and Wife because they can consent police to a search of your computer.
3. If you use encryption I recommend you use TrueCrypt because it uses AES Encryption, in fact you can use three encryption schemes such as AES, Twofish, and Serpent together. Cops can’t force you to open the encryption container, unless they Use tactics such as torture, torture camps, Tasers, or Waterboarding, if that happens use the Hidden Volume function so you can show the police your not a file-sharers/downloading criminal so then your free to go.
4. Always try to encrypt your DATA, whether you use Tor, Hotspot Shield, SSH Services, Anonymous Proxy Services that guarantee your privacy that way cops can’t spy on your traffic without using heavy encryption breakers which might disturb and mess up the internet ruining our economy as we know it so they have to let you use encrypted traffic.
5. When sharing a file to further protect yourself from prosecution share until you get at least 2 or 3 seeds then immediately stop seeding, then your IP Address will be taken off of other peers lists, it’s not bulletproof but can further protect you from prosecution.
6. You could also use Tor or a trustworthy proxy to upload to file hosting sites like Mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare, mytempfile, or any other free hosting sites and share your data through there and post to warez sites, under proxy protection, that way your sharing IP will never be revealed.
7. You could possibly use Tor for Bittorrent because you can host hidden services so you could share anonymously through Tor using hidden
services:
In your Torrc file you see these configurations:
############### This section is just for location-hidden services ###
## Once you have configured a hidden service, you can look at the
## contents of the file “…/hidden_service/hostname” for the address
## to tell people.
##
## HiddenServicePort x y:z says to redirect requests on port x to the
## address y:z.
#HiddenServiceDir C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataTorhidden_service/
#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80
#HiddenServiceDir C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataTorother_hidden_service/
#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80
#HiddenServicePort 22 127.0.0.1:22
ok now we are gonna do some tweaking:
Say you use port 17492 for seeding to peers, in english that means sharing to people using bittorrent.
#HiddenServiceDir C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataTorhidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 17492 127.0.0.1:17492
So this is what you change in your torrc file.
I’m not sure if you have to also do HiddenServiceDir, if you do ask anyone who knows about Tor for help but whatever you do don’t tell them your gonna use Bittorrent as a hidden service, otherwise they will refuse to tell you anything but file-sharing is wrong, and all that bla bla bla BS.
8. Always erase the free space of your hard drive every week or two times a week to prevent cops from finding deleted data. Also always erase your cache, cookies, MRU, and other tracks every day.
9. If you have a suspicion a police cop is going after you always get a small-as-it-can-be external hard drive and store all your computers data, then erase your computer, with over 10 overwrites, then restore your computer with a legally purchased operating system or restore disk, install tons of freeware and legal software, then hide the drive in an area the cops would never search, I recommend you put it in a waterproof-fireproof lockbox and burry it where your neighbors can’t see you, or hide it underground and when the cops go through your door, they will only find a working computer, no copyright infringement, they search through your house, no evidence, and they cannot convict you of a crime, and also remember use a Wi-fi and tell the cops you can’t control the airwaves and you try to warn people to use your Wi-fi legally, and then your off the hook.
10. Always try to share when lots of people are sharing because it is less likely a spy would pick your your shared file and collect your IP.
11. When erasing your hard drive, flash drive, SD Card, Disk on key, etc etc Always use a bootup erasing software for boot devices you don’t wanna use anymore, and always use a more Advanced/Secure Erasing software like Active Killdisk, Whitecanyon WipeDrive 5, Darieks Boot and Nuke, or VAIOSoft DriveEraser (Recommended and Freeware 
) to erase sensitive drives, you could also use Eraser to erase drives free space but I recommend you use a advanced erasing software because it erases everything, including the Master File Table (MFT) and the disk is swept clean and ready for reuse and to be formatted. I recommend you erase 8 times or more to prevent your DATA from being recovered from the FBI and MPAA professionals. It costs a bunch of money to recover erased disks but these powerful corporations probably could do this type of thing and it would be small change to them, since they could sue you.
12. Anytime you wanna throw away a disk, don’t do it because the FBI has been known to search through peoples trash cans, so always shred your DVD or CD, hammer the top pieces and bottom pieces of the disk after you shred it, put black marks on the data area, then throw it in a fire, if there’s no fire drown it in acid, if that doesn’t work or if you don’t have acid use large scissors on a whole disk and cut it(not recommend), or the shredded parts of the disk(recommended) and cut the shredded pieces to even smaller pieces and making recovery or police forensic scans impossible, if it’s a RW use full erase, or you could a blow torch on it.
For more info on how to destroy a disk check out Destroy-a-CD-or-DVD.
13. ALWAYS I Repeat ALWAYS Use a Firewall because it keeps the cops out of your computer, not only that they can’t ban firewalls because legitimate/innocent users Must Have a firewall because of illegitimate hacker attacks, this is your perfect legal defense against the RIAA Hackers, MPAA Hackers, FBI Hackers, Police Hackers, Blackmailers, Revengers, and Other hackers.
These are the firewalls I recommend: Very Recommended: Sygate Firewall Pro, A Pirated Pro version would be better recommended (well Sygate went out of business because of Symantec, so pirating Sygate Firewall Pro won’t get you arrested) SSH Tunnel (Great working internal port filtering firewall, not very recommend if you file-share with many different or get peers with many different ports) (Recommend for servers, trackers, and very paranoid users) (SSH Tunnel Firewall would be recommended if you wanna black ports below 1024, but keep open ports such as 53 DNS, 80 HTTP, 443 HTTPS, 21/20 FTP, 25 SMTP, and 110 POP3) Zonealarm, (Recommended but very advanced. Novice file-sharers, and novice downloaders may have problems with their file-sharing clients until they know exactly what to do)
The reason I recommend Sygate Firewall whether Pro or Standard is because every time a application, Spyware, Virus Downloader, Browser, or any application connects to the internet you can give it permission to connect once and have it popup again, or you could tell it to always allow it if you hate getting connect permission popups all the time. Very recommend for users that don’t wanna validate their Windows XPs, and users that don’t wanna validate their Vistas either. Also recommended for anyone that uses any software that Calls Home like a spy.
Ok now you got a lot of tips, Now I won’t share any more until the next version of this guide, that’s right I will keep making changes and updates since the laws can change, technology can change, products and services can change, file-sharing protocols can change, well Thanks for reading this and I hope I gave you enough information on how to stay out of trouble while file-sharing/downloading
Thanks and have a great day!
Download Ben’s Sharer & Downloader Protector Pack (No Big Brother)
**Special THX to Brian for the heads up, and to Ben, aka “Mr Leader,” for releasing such a great safety guide for file-sharers looking to have a safe and joyous holiday season (Especially with Oscar screeners time right around the corner).**
Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
Tips on how to not get busted for file-sharing
3 Quick Ways to Watch Movies for FREE!
3 quick ways to watch TV shows for FREE
BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
uTorrent – A Beginner’s guide to BitTorrent downloading
News Tip? Comment? Suggestion? jared@zeropaid.com
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You know the way copyright(extortion) laws are going Zeropaid will probably be sued for the get out of jail free image.
Some tosser would have bought the copyright for that i’m sure.
As for the article prolly a little too extreme unless you has some serious things to hide
Yeah this article is completely ridiculous. Unless you’re sharing gigs of snuff porn that you yourself have created I cant imagine anybody being interested in the advice here.
Not to mention that installing Windows over and over again is:
1. Extremely time-consuming
2. A massive pain in the ass
3. Totally pointless anyway
The data is still on the hard drive even if you “erased” it or re-installed the OS (one or ten times). It can be retrieved with electron microscopes if need be. The only way to guarantee that the files cant be reclaimed is to physically destroy the hard drive. And the bury the pieces on different continents. Or burn it I guess.
But in any case this is going too far when we’re talking about sharing Britney Spears’ latest single. So less of these paranoid survivalist black UN helicopter articles please.
Tor is not designed to be used for file sharing and can not handle that kind of traffic… This guide is not useful in reality….
Other than the Tor recommendation I found the article fairly informative. At least he isn’t pushing that PeerGuardian BS.
Stalin your an idiot do you seriously believe someone would try and read that many bytes individually? Even if you did detect them you have to hope that you have enough of the pieces to recompile the file. If you do as the article tells you and rewrite o’s onto your hard drive it increases the difficulty of recovery exponentially and outside the range of almost all groups that might have it in for you.
ok this is really GAY you wont just get caught for doing that unless you do it in front of their faces. and come to think about it they probably use torrents too………..not a better way other than trying to hack into 34 people per file.(and theres even about 400+ seeders that could have the same file) so if its possible…….yes but if its legal nope.
I agree how about some common sence advice that we dont already know. Now that would be helpful and a benefit to all of us trying to stay out of trouble. Articles like this make me feel like I have an FBI agent out back looking through my trash right now.
I agree with mountain rage. By using erasing software and overwriting at least seven or eight times you are pretty much limiting any chance of any reasonable amount of data being recovered. The Electron microscope approach has been tried but is not particularly good for recovering data. It would also take many thousands of man-hours to retrieve anything useful (Assuming that there was sufficient contiguous pieces) and cost an awful lot of money.
As for the RIAA and all those other anti-piracy organizations worldwide do you really think that they need access to your computer to catch you? Of course they don’t. Any unsuspecting person that has a shared folder visible in a P2P app or tries to download a torrent that is being monitored is easy bait. The aforementioned organizations only need proof that you made a file available to share… something they can just as easily do from their end.
As for TOR I suspect most people would agree that it is simply too slow to do anything useful. Encrypting VPN type services will work ok but how much do you trust the companies running them? How likely is it that they would open up like a clam shell once they were under any serious threat themselves?
If you’re going through that much trouble an easier option would be just to store all your infringing material at a friend’s house who doesn’t file share and to use only a single external drive and swap it out for a clean one when done and keep that at your friend’s house too. If you’re like me and have friends that practically live at each other’s apartments it should be pretty simple to do.
If you’re going through that much trouble an easier option would be just to store all your infringing material at a friend’s house who doesn’t file share and to use only a single external drive and swap it out for a clean one when done and keep that at your friend’s house too. If you’re like me and have friends that practically live at each other’s apartments it should be pretty simple to do.