Drici Hachem

Operation Safehouse Introduction

2026-07-15
security privacy anonymity

Operation Safehouse Introduction

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”

— W. Edwards Deming

Thinking back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At its foundation lies our need for physical safety i.e the assurance that we can exist without threat. Today, in an increasingly interconnected world that took it’s modern form 40 years after the proposition of this hierarchy, we must expand this concept to include Digital Safety aswell.

The internet by default often suggests easy solutions like using a pseudonym, create a burner profile all over Facebook/Tiktok/Reddit/Instagram… and you are on your way to become the next digital Yasmina Khadra. While using pseudonyms can certainly protect your identity for casual purposes, but the vast majority of those are anything but anonymous and can easily be traced to their real identity by your local police officer (make of this what you will) random people with the Open Source Intelligence knowledge, and of course the trolls!

We can consider this as a good thing as most criminals/trolls are not tech-savvy and will usually be identified with ease. But this is also a terrible thing as most political dissidents, human rights activists and whistleblowers…, can also be tracked rather easily due to bad privacy practices.

This series of articles, Operation Safehouse, is designed to educate the Algerian community on the basics of Privacy and Anonymity. Understanding this distinction between the two is pretty much important but we’ll keep it in simple terms: - Privacy is about people knowing who you are but not knowing what you are doing. - Anonymity is about people knowing what you are doing but not knowing who you are.

Will this guide help you protect yourself from the three letter national and international agenices, or the big M if they are out to find you? Probably not as they will beat you up with a hammer bought from ouedkniss for 500DA until you spit out the password for your cool RSA encrypted laptop instead of spending billions making a supercomputer to crack it.

Psst… jokes aside tho. Without doubt, there are also advanced ways to mitigate attacks against such advanced and skilled agencies but those are just out of the scope of this series or possibly any guide that you’ll manage to access online. It is crucially important that you understand the limits of this series. And therefore, this will not double in size to help with those advanced mitigations as this is just way too complex and will require an exceedingly high technical knowledge and skill level that is not expected from the targeted audience of this guide that we’ll mention later nor the author :)

We will walk through the mechanics used by big tech companies to de-anonymize, track, and identify you to have a clear understanding of the risks involved. As our ultimate goal is not just to provide tools, but to expose readers to the knowledge so they can build and maintain resilient, truly anonymous digital footprints, safeguarding their voices and freedom online.

You might think this series has no real use cases up to this point but there are many of which we list a few: - Bypassing Online Censorship - Resisting Digital Oppression - Defending Against Online Harassment and Cyberbullying - Protecting Against Unlawful Online Surveillance - Anonymous Whistleblowing Online - Anonymous Digital Activism - Anonymous Online Journalism - Anonymous Academic Activities

This is written with and for good-intent to serve those who might not be knowledgeable enough to consider the big picture.

Requirements

Limitations

This is not intended for anything that could be proven bad using common sense.

Spreading the Word

Every operation depends on people willing to carry the message forward.

Initially I had planned for a very tight distribution of this conent to only a few from the Algerian Olympiad in Informatics and the Algerian Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, to attempt to redacted. But after discussion it’s clear that it’s a wrong approach. as the more people working to protect themselves, the better off the end result is.

If you believe what you are reading is worth sharing, help it reach the next person. Drop an article into a relevant Facebook group as it’s the most active social media platform in Algeria, post it on X, mention it on LinkedIn, reference it from your own blog, or recommend it in an online community that values privacy and digital freedom. If you’re attending conferences, university lectures, workshops, competitions, hackathons, or local meetups, spread the word there as well. Sometimes the most effective outreach is simply sharing a link with a friend over pizza carré or bringing up a discussion among classmates or colleagues.

Privacy grows stronger when knowledge is shared. Every conversation started, every article shared, and every new reader recruited strengthens the network.

Target Audience

This series will be written at a technical level appropriate for those with a bare minimum knowledge on computers, people who like to tinker with their computer or at least willing to do so for the sake of their own privacy will have no problem (hopefully!) following along with us. fortunately you can always reach out to the nearest computer geek around you and ask for help, or just reach out to me personally and we’ll see how that pans out.

As far as demographics go, I expect this series of articles to be somewhat useful to a wide variety of people from several walks of life. In particular, some of the major categories that I had in mind planning for this are Algerian : Whistleblowers, Bloggers and Independent Journalists, Programmers and Security Researchers, Potential Victims of Identity Theft (Everyone who has access to the internet) or just anyone that is interested in this topic and somehow found himself reading this.

a Very long note

I realize by the time of planning what to write about that the articles coming up are going to have a bulky amount of content. Please do not let that stop you from taking small steps toward achieving the level of privacy appropriate for your own personal needs. Privacy is a marathon, not a single sprint. Any actions that you take will be helpful, and you should never expect to apply every principle within each and every article all at once. It takes people with different backgrounds a different amount of time to be able to create their own private and secure digital life for their needs and as the Internet and it’s gadgets are known to change rapidly you will find yourself still learning every day and make mistakes that you will identify and work on improving. one should keep in mind that our individual privacy playbook is never complete.

Before we take a deep dive into the technical tasks in the upcoming articles there are a few warnings that we must point out. First, things will change, hence the exact steps taken in the articles may need to be modified so that it matches the updates of software applications and services. Make sure to use the overall methods presented here as nothing but a guide as you may need to research application changes that has occurred since an article was pushed out to the public. Also note that some services may entirely disppear so you are encouraged to look up new alternatives that are suggested by others.

Second. there is pretty much no perfect privacy playbook for everyone that has access to the internet which points out that you don’t really need to replicate everything you read here and most likely as you read through these articles and other resources to complement you will manage to generate your own opinions on matters and establish your own privacy protocols. Also you may just disagree entirely with me at times which is technically ideal! If we agree on everything, only one of us shall exist.

Now that we cleared things up you will be having your first task to deal with, namely the most important task to deal with, you should take some time to define your scope and think about what could be relevant to you in your day-to-day life. Many experts cybersecurity will refer this with a fancy term “threat model”, however as this term is overused alongside that this is aimed to no specific background we’ll replace this term with two simple questions to ask yourself “What do I want to hide?” and “Why am I even reading this?”. Obviously your answers could be ranging anywhere from very complex to surprisngly simple or you may not even have an answer in mind yet! which is why we’re welcoming everyone aboard Operation Safehouse.