With the NSA leaker having gone public, I got to wondering how he’s going to stay secret in his online doings. Hopefully he’s got some rather intense protection together.

1. You’d want to move your cash, as much as possible, to another bank under another name. Tricky to do nowadays.
2. He’d want at least two VPN services, preferably that can be paid with by bitcoins, to chain together. Possibly using one of these to get to a cloud-based machine, which then in itself is using a VPN for outgoing connections.
3. No logins to anything anywhere. Any previous email account that was set up, any online services or accounts, nothing. And no identifying himself by his name, including no Reddit AMAs.
4. A blanked laptop, purchased just pre-leak, running off a live CD. This way nothing gets written to the hard drive to be incriminating. All previous hardware should be destroyed and abandoned.
5. No new hardware after the leak. You wouldn’t want to buy any new hardware that hadn’t already been in your possession due to the possibility of introducing bugs.

Meanwhile, unfortunately, his family and friends (and staunchest supporters) are likely going to have equipment seized shortly. Frankly even all this will only keep them off him for so long, and that depends on his real life habits too, not just his digital habits.