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Can you share the link?

There is an entire regiment to staying anonymous on the Internet.  Never using the same handle/avatar/username on different sites, using email services like StartMail for encryption, using proxy servers to bounce around your sources, using TOR or an appropriate browser that drops cookies and the like, etc. etc.  There are literally dozens of books on the subject.  That doesn't even get in to your smartphone, any IoT crap or Alexa/Siri/Google assistant in your home.  Bottom line, it's a commitment that if you break JUST ONCE, you start over - because anything on the Internet is forever and computers can correlate that tweet from the baseball game that Google did facial recognition on against that forum post 6 years ago and backfill everything else.  For example, we caught an employee who was leaking info through Twitter because he took a pic on his phone and posted it (weeks apart) on both his "leaker" and his "public" Twitter accounts.  Our correlation software pegged him in minutes after his second photo post.

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Interesting.  What line of work?

We have had numerous officers use LE Web Protect (operated by former US cops) after shootings or high profile incidents, and we’ve found that it works pretty well for keeping personal information from getting out online.  The most seasoned of hackers will be able to find something on you, but your average BLM or antifa asshole won’t find anything they can use against you.

There are different stages to online anonymity.  One thing I don’t do is publicly verify the agency I work for in an open forum like this one.  This isn’t restricted, so I will never say outright what agency I work for.  On restricted forums where there is some moderator vetting, I will say my agency, but I’m still cautious about what I say because my administration loves to selectively enforce the social media policy.  

The big killer is social media, which can be traced back to you in some way, shape or form.  At some point you have to be comfortable with a certain level of your information being out there if you plan to use the internet.  You just have to decide how much.  Sharing photos can be very telling, and simply changing your name or restricting access to people may or may not be enough.  When the riots kicked off, I went through and cleaned house on my FB account.  I even got rid of former classmates from high school who were super left, because I didn’t trust them to not try and dox me somehow.   Guy above talked about it being a full time job to truly stay anonymous, and in talking to our in-house Geek Squad officers, I’ve heard the same thing from them.  I’ve been amazed numerous times when we go to court on a report I took, and I am shown digital evidence that investigators and our Geek Squad cops drummed up.  Seriously nuts.  Cell phone data, internet search history, everything.  

We had two officers who were involved several years ago in a high profile shooting and they had their info scrubbed off the net.  Someone at the state BCA “accidentally” leaked their work cell phone GPS data and WiFi connection history to the public, and that data included the home address of one of the officers.  In a twist of irony, a government privacy watchdog group saw it immediately and made it known to the press (without giving press the GPS coordinates of the officer’s house), and the state immediately pulled the data and launched an investigation that wound out routing out a rat in their ranks.  However, during that time, anyone could have retrieved that data if they knew what to look for.  This was data that was not supposed to be public either.    But this is the extent to which your information is at risk in the digital age. I’m no tech guru, so I can’t speak to a lot of the technical side of the equation.  I can certainly see how difficult it is to disappear online though.  This also highlights how it doesn’t necessarily need to be you that puts the info out.  I know officers who have had their personal information intentionally leaked by people in their city administration.  Massive, highly illegal data breaches, but once the info is out there, it’s out there.  Data is almost uncontrollable now it seems.

I hear you.  In the interest of community policing my agency is super facebook happy.  When you Google my name the fist thing that pops up is an article about my class getting hired at the dept which also includes a picture of us.

My dept's city got hit pretty hard by the riots.  You would think the city or dept would change their thinking a bit about their tactics and posting so much shit on social media but they didnt.  In the afyermath I've heard of guns getting pulled on officer's families because of their FOP plates.

There are many reasons I avoid all department social media stuff.

I was involved in a shooting a few years ago and my department media guy posted my name and public details of the incident to the department Facebook account. It happened on overnight shift. My wife was home asleep. My step daughter gets up early for work and saw the post. She called my wife crying. My wife called me and asked me WTH is going on. I didn’t want her to know till everything was calmed down and wanted to be the one to tell her so I could spin it to where she wouldn’t be upset over it. I wasn’t too happy but it was just a mistake by the PIO.

My department has also been involved with high profile media coverage and I strictly avoid it. I’m a pretty private person and prefer to avoid all public attention. Some people crave it and I’m happy to let them have all they want. There is enough images and videos of me out there.....don’t have any desire to have more.

Social media needs to be used correctly, and most agencies don’t use it correctly.

Our PIO is a non-sworn admin lackey.  Nobody knows how he got his job.  He once reported that police shot an unarmed man, and failed to mention the guy was shot trying to take a cop’s gun. So not unarmed.  But of course that started 18 days worth of non-stop civil unrest.  

We confronted him about why he said it. He said it was because the media asked him and he had to respond.  We asked him if he ever thought that saying “It’s an ongoing investigation and I can’t release further information related to the investigation at this time” would have been appropriate.  He goes “Yeah, in retrospect that could have been better.”   Like, how the fuck is it that we have to tell you how to do your job?

Because he got hired with a liberal arts degree, and he doesn't know what his job really means? (hint: you are NOT A REPORTER. You are NOT A FRIEND OF THE MEDIA.)

@DTIguy

OP is this in the current issue of the FOP Journal or your local lodge newsletter?  I checked the most current journal issue through FOP Connect since I already tossed the paper copy, but couldn't find anything,

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I can't get it to come up, but I am pretty sure it is the one ran by a CA cop. Almost all of the stuff done by the company you can do for free. Go through any OSINT list and you can request your info to be removed. That is what they do.

Keep in mind removal is often temporary. You need to do the same thing every year.

Someone at EPIC had a diy kit they shared. I will see if I can find it.