To those journalists who are surveillanced by personal attack or institutional attack, or in other words, a high risk journalists. There are a certain number of attack that could be done, first, it is called a sniffing attack, which could track your browsing activity, so the sniffer can collect your data of what you are up to or researching about by your activity history on the internet. Or an institutional attack from a state or organization, an ISP(Internet Service Provider) can track your browsing history easily and collect your whatever you do in the internet. VPN could be the answer, but sometimes it is not enough.
Journalists who relies on the internet to research something that could be lead to something important or something dangerous, with a great possibility don’t want their activtiy internet to be known. Because if what you’re up to appear to some parties to be dangerous for them, and you have been surveilled for a while, they could knock you off. Like some server in Minecraft online dedicated for journalists that are searching for many documents data, they could go anonymous and safely there without being known what they are up to, and if you don’t want your activity on the internet tracked, there is a way, it is called noisy.
So, the simple explanation about noisy is a tool that run in the background so you won’t be disturbed by them, which flood your traffic on the internet with many requests to another website. So if someone collect your data in the internet, they will find you have opened many different website, while actually what you browse in the browser is not that website. I will tell you how to install and use this noisy to help you obfuscate your traffic data like you have been browsing many website.
First, you need to install Python. If you use Linux, it’s probably already there; if you use windows you need to manually install python. You can find the step-by-step in the internet. Then you must install python requests module by pip install requests. After that, download the noisy code pack from GitHub. In https://github.com/itayH/noisy click download as zip. If you have git clone in your Os you could just download the code pack by git clone https://github.com/itayH/noisy.git. Once downloaded, unpack the zip file.
Then open the file. If you use Windows, just open the unpacked zip file, then edit the config.json file with Notepad or similar software, but Notepad is always exists in Windows, so you can use it. If you use Linux you can edit it with the gedit command or the vim command(if you have installed vim). Here you can edit the maximum time of each browsing traffic and give it a very fast and minimal time for each traffic, which is one second, by changing the value in
„min_sleep“: 0,
„max_sleep“: 1,
so that the change of each site get faster, so you could look like you have opened many website. Then of course, the website in the config.json list is just a few, so it will be looped back after the iteration of the website come to the end of the website, you could add more website or just like me add so many website by adding a list of websites in here. Or you could just add a few website so that you always look like always opening the same website each time you are active in the internet, it’s up to you.
Now, to run this program, if you use Windows, go to the command prompt then type cd command with the folder of the noisy unpacked zip file. I recommend you put the unpacked file in the My Documents folder if you use Windows, cause you just need to type „cd noisy“ in the command prompt. The same with Linux, just cd command to the noisy folder. Then type „python noisy.py –config.json“ from the command prompt, or from a Linux terminal. Then the script will run in the background, and you can browse to your journalism project more securely in the browser.