Hi,
The reason is that, in the US, we don’t have choices in this regard. Most (all?) local service areas here have effectively 1 or 2 high-speed ISPs to choose from.
this is funny as the situation in Germany is very much the same: Especially in rural areas, there only is Deutsche Telekom AG, which cooperates with the Federal Intelligence Service and has been providing IP address space to it - in fact, I have no reason to believe it has discontinued to do so.
I tried using the Tor browser, and that does work, but I’m guessing it’s not going through Ipfire’s Tor add-in and in any case, I want all traffic on all our home network devices to go through it, not simply web browsers.
This is true, the Tor Browser is using it’s own Tor daemon so it does not rely on your IPFire system.
Personally, I strongly recommend against
- tunneling all traffic through Tor. Most applications are not prepared for this, they might leak your public IP address, and making them using Tor is difficult and might be dangerous.
I rather recommend creating firewall groups for devices which are really required to access the internet, and prevent anybody else from doing so. The less network traffic you emit, the smaller your attack vector becomes. - using something else rather than the Tor Browser or solutions like Whonix if you need extra security. This includes not to re-configure any existing browser to use the Tor daemon of IPFire, as they mostly lack important privacy protections.
Looking at Whonix, they did some pretty amazing things in order to prevent deanonymisation through your systems clock, keystrokes, and so on. Most browsers even allow accessing your MAC address (the FBI took advantage of that), which is disastrous if you aim to stay anonymous.
To keep it simple: Please use the Tor Browser, or Whonix if you are more paranoid. (You might have a look at Qubes OS then, it’s what I use, and makes dealing with Whonix more simple.) Only allow essential outgoing internet traffic, and consider enforcing all of your clients to go through the web proxy integrated into IPFire.
Setting up all of this stuff is work, but in the end, you do not need to worry about your ISPs messing around with your privacy. All they see is you are using Tor - as ~ 400,000 people in the US do - in fact, this number is believed to be much higher.
Sorry for the length of my reply. Like anything else, there are no simple answers to complex issues, and staying anonymous definitely is one.
Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller