Hacks By Camwi

If you live in the United States, France, UK, you may be thinking that getting music and movies from ThePirateBay isn't such a great idea anymore.

Well, you're wrong. By taking these easy steps, you can protect your privacy from the prying eyes of RIAA/MPAA and the gov't. The result? No one will come knocking your door, or if they do, they won't have any proof.

Important:

• Make sure you have a strong password for your login/encryption, a password like 'iruletheworld' won't do. "G7s&8bnu9#8vHU" will. If you can't remember it, write it somewhere and put it in a SAFE, HIDDEN location.
• Get a good password here.

Clarification:

The way anti p2p guys find you is by entering the swarm themselves and logging the IP's, which are visible even if you enable encryption. The IP must be visible in order for the data packets to reach destination.

That's why the only true defense is encrypting all your hard disk, if and when they come, they won't be able to find any illegal stuff. Just an encrypted blob. The rest of the tips are just to minimize the risk of them coming after you.

Bittorrent Clients

• Always try to use the latest version of your bittorrent client
• Use popular and acknowledged clients (uTorrent, Transmission open source)
• Force outgoing encryption, enable port randomization(optional), disable "Allow legacy connections"
  
• (Optional) Try to get an invite to a private bittorent tracker. Check the net for those who don't keep logs. Usually anti p2p organization focus on open and very popular trackers such as ThePirateBay. Let's make it clear that they do in fact track private trackers, but in my tests I found less 'hostile' connections from Media Defender and the likes.
  

Block unwanted IP's

• To block all connections from government, anti peer 2 peer organizations download Peer Guardian.
• 
• Peer Guardian works by blocking all connections from blacklisted IP's known to be Government or Anti P2P. The blacklist updates frequently and is very effective in my tests.
• PeerGuardian is Open Source and works with Windows XP

Encryption

If your IP pops up as 'interesting' they will pay you a visit. Having everything encrypted is your advantage. Don't worry about NSA using their supercomputers to crack the encryption (as some alarmists say). They have better things to do.

• Enable full drive encryption if possible.
• Create a separate partition(recommended if you don't want full drive encryption) for your downloads and install True Crypt.
• 
• True Crypt is a "free open source disk encryption utility for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux". It's easy to use, just follow the help files if you get stuck.
• If you have Windows Vista and a TPM chip, enable Bitlocker encryption ; on Mac OS X you can use FileVault
• 

Network

• If your wireless router supports this option, create a separate SSID and set it to Open. Anyone will be able to connect and you can't be liable(someone in the comments said this won't work in the US anymore).
  
• For your general privacy enable WPA2 with TKIP security on your router, and also change the default admin password.
• If you have Dynamic IP it's a good idea to restart your router every couple of days. You get a new IP address this way(someone in the comments said this only slows them down; if they are after you they WILL find you no matter what; let's just say you won't be transferring 30 GB on an IP but on 10 different IPs, who do you think they'll track down first?).
• Avoid AT&T Internet service at all costs, they are known to work very close to the different security agencies and anti P2P organizations.

Bonus Tip:
People have suggested in the comments that using a VPN(a virtual encrypted private network) is the only way to can't track you. There are available commercial services like Relakks from our friends at The Pirate Bay.