A master class in online snooping

Before the Internet, being a private detective was tough, time-consuming work. Gumshoes like Philip Marlowe spent days piecing together clues, getting mixed up with brass-knuckled brutes and sociopathic femmes fatales along the way.

Thanks to the Web, all that has changed. With a few keystrokes, you can uncover the names and unlisted phone numbers of the suspicious people who live down the street, find out where they lived before moving next to you, how much they paid for their house, and how generously they donated to their favorite presidential candidate. You can also retrieve websites that were taken down for nefarious reasons, surf anonymously, and easily create false identities.

And unlike Marlowe, who had to bribe every unsavory character he came across to pry loose a morsel of information, you needn't spend a penny to find what you're looking for online. The following list of free websites will yield more dirt than pressing a double sawbuck into the hand of a tight-lipped bartender.

Adapted from Rule the Web: How To Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier, by Mark Frauenfelder (St. Martin's Griffin, June 2007).

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1. How can I find someone's unlisted phone number, their current address, and where they've lived previously?

All of the big search engines offer some kind of people finder service, but they're little more than online phonebooks. If a person has an unlisted number, you are out of luck. But not if you use ZabaSearch. The search engine, which gets its information from public databases that aren't always directly linked to the Web, has got the goods on almost everyone. Even though many of the addresses and phone numbers in it are outdated, I've used it successfully more than once to track down someone I needed to get in touch with for a story I was writing. One such person, a well-known author, asked me how I got his phone number. When I told him about ZabaSearch, he checked out the site himself and e-mailed me back, thanking me for introducing him to this useful service.

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2. How can I see websites that were taken down for nebulous reasons?
Even though countless websites are deleted by their owners or the authorities every day, it's a simple matter to find archived copies of the expurgated sites and find out what they were trying to hide.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine provides a fossil record of extinct websites. To use it, enter the Web address you hope to find and click "Take Me Back." If you're lucky, the Archive will have at least one copy (or more, organized by date). Firefox users can install an extension called ErrorZilla Mod that displays a special error page when you can't reach a web page. It gives you the option to try loading the page again, or searching Google Cache or the Wayback Machine.

3. How can I surf the Web from anywhere in the world without being blocked or traced?
The governments of countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and China control the way their citizens use the Internet. One way they do that is by blocking access to websites that contain political criticism or adult material. Most of these countries use "censorware" developed in the United States. Censorware works by comparing all website requests against a list of forbidden websites. If you are in the United Arab Emirates and try to access a forbidden site, you'll see something like this on your screen:

Some hotels, libraries, companies, and other organizations in free countries such as the United States block certain websites from Internet users, too. Fortunately, there are ways to get around censorware. This is especially useful for people who live in repressive regimes, but its also useful for anyone who find themselves behind a censorware barrier that blocks access to sites they want to access.

One of the most effective ways to defeat censorware is by using Java Anonymous Proxy (JAP), a free service developed by a university in Dresden, Germany. JAP works by creating a bunch of untraceable, encrypted connections across the Internet, making it impossible for anyone to trace the source or the destination of the data going through it.

Because JAP doesn't let censorware know the destination address of a site, the censorware's blacklist of forbidden sites is useless. In addition, your IP address is hidden, making you effectively anonymous. (You can find out what other websites know about you by visiting whatsmyip.org. You'll see your IP address, type of Web browser you are using, screen resolution, and more. When you use JAP, your IP address will be replaced with something like "proxy1.anon-online.org," instead of your actual IP address.)

Of course, if your cookies are active, then the websites can still identify who you are. (Make sure to set your Web browser to reject cookies before you attempt to surf anonymously.)

It's also important to note that while a proxy might let you get past a firewall and access blocked sites, they don't prevent a company (or a country's) system administration staff from discovering that you are using a proxy or monitoring what you're looking at online. Proceed with caution.

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4. How can I create a false identity?
To access news and information on sites without having to disclose my personal information, I often use BugMeNot, a free service that maintains a database of usernames and passwords you can use to gain instant access to over 100,000 outlets. I don't feel that an online newspaper has the right to know who I am and what articles I read. After all, when I drop two quarters into a newspaper vending machine, I don't have to swipe my driver's license into a card reader.

When BugMeNot doesn't work, I'll sometimes just enter a fake name and address information into the form. The best way to obtain a fake identity is to visit the Fake Name Generator at fakenamegenerator.com. The information it generates includes a name, address, phone number, e-mail address, mother's maiden name, and credit card and social security numbers. Not only is this good for accessing snoopy newspaper sites, it's also a great way to infuriate spammers and scam artists.

There are other legitimate reasons why you might need to generate fake names: to test a software application by populating it with fake user data, to log into a message board from a foreign country that uses an address form that doesn't work with the local address format, to create a pseudonym on the Internet so that you can maintain a separate online identity from your life in the real world, and so on.

Once you go to the site and accept the terms of service (basically promising that you won't abuse the service to commit fraud, which would be a very bad thing to do), all you have to do is click the "Go" button to get a page fake information that can fool almost any form.

5. How can I figure out how much someone paid for their house and its current market value?
Zip over to Zillow, a treasure trove of residential real-estate information. Thankfully, you don't need to fill out any personal information to gain access to the site. Just enter an address or zip code in the search field and Zillow will return a satellite map with house values superimposed over the properties.

If you are interested in the average home price for a town or zip code, enter it in the search field, and Zillow will produce a map with superimposed values like the one shown here:

Zillow calls its house-value estimates "zestimates." To come up with a zestimate for a particular piece of property, Zillow uses a "secret formula" that takes into account the size of the house, sales data for comparable properties in the area, and "hundreds of home details." Zillow claims that its zestimates are accurate to within 10 percent of the properties' selling price. If you believe the value for a particular property is off, you can go to "My Zestimator" and edit the known facts about the home (such as recent remodels).

In addition to the satellite photo views, Zillow offers higher resolution "bird's eye" views of houses in major urban locales. Check out the bird's eye views of famous houses such as the Playboy Mansion (zestimated value: $5,496,795), the house that was featured in the Beverly Hillbillies ($25,291,876), and the Brady Bunch house (a relative bargain at $1,046,462).

Zillow is always adding useful features, and it's worthwhile to spend some time exploring them. For instance, its "heat maps" show you color-coded, per-square-foot values of areas on a map for major metropolitan areas.

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6. How can I find out what political party someone has donated to?
Federal law requires that people who contribute to political campaigns provide their personal information. The Federal Election Commission keeps this data, but its website isn't very easy to use. In fact, it's downright confusing.

That's where Fundrace comes in. Just select "Neighbor Search‚" and type in an address or a name and you'll be presented with a list of the names and addresses of political contributors from the last presidential election, along with how much they contributed.

The searches aren't limited to your neighborhood, of course. I entered "Barbara Bush" in the search field and learned that she contributed $2,000 to the George W. Bush campaign. I clicked on Mrs. Bush's address (10000 Memorial Drive, Houston, TX 77024), which brought up a list of everyone else in the same area that contributed. Lo and behold, a gentleman named Mr. George H. W. Bush at the same address also donated $2,000 to the George W. Bush campaign.

Beyond satisfying your curiosity about your neighbors' political affiliation, you can use Fundrace to organize a block party to raise funds for your party or favorite presidential candidate.

7. How can I wipe data off my hard drive?

When you delete a file on your computer, the computer doesn't really erase it from the hard drive. All it does is remove a few bytes of information from the file that's there to keep it from being written over by another program. In fact, if you accidentally erase a program from your computer by emptying the trash icon, you can use one of many different kinds of utilities to recover the file. Even formatting a disk drive won't get rid of the data. All the information will remain on the drive.

As an experiment for an article he was writing, a journalist friend bought a dozen used hard drives for sale at a second-hand computer store. These drives were all pulled from used personal computers. When my friend attached them to his computer and fired them up, he was surprised to discover that their former owners hadn't erased some of the drives. And even the drives that had been erased were still full of easily recoverable data. In the interest of science, he undeleted the contents of the drives, discovering a wealth of financial data, personal correspondence, and a huge amount of pornography. In the hands of an unscrupulous person, this information could have been used for blackmailing their former owners or worse. Fortunately, my friend is the honest sort, and after filing his article he did to the drives what their former owners should have done before they sold them: he scrubbed the data.

Data scrubbing involves not only erasing the files, but also writing over them with ones and zeros so that the magnetic particles that store the information lose all record of what they once held.

It's not hard to scrub an entire disk (or even just a selected file or folder than you don't ever want anyone to see, including yourself, ever again). On the Macintosh, you can use the built-in Disk Utility program to securely delete a disk. First, you need to boot up using a drive other than the one you want to zap. Your OS X install disk will work. Just stick the CD into the slot and restart the computer with the C key pressed. Then open "Disk Utility" from the "Go" menu and select the disk drive to be erased. From there, click the "Erase‚" button and then "Security Options" near the bottom of the window. If you select the Defense Department Standard, you can be assured that no one will ever be able to undelete the files on your hard drive.

Windows users can download a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke. Copy the program to a CD, then boot your computer with it to "nuke" everything on the hard drive.

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8. How can I save a website before they can take it down and destroy the evidence?

There are several ways to save Web pages before they go up in smoke like the tape in the beginning of the old Mission: Impossible TV show. The first is to simply save the page as a text file. In Firefox, select "Save Page As" from the File menu and choose "Text Files" in the format pull-down menu. You can also choose to save it as a "Web page, complete‚" that will be stored on your hard drive with images and formatting intact. When you save a Web page this way, a folder is created on your hard drive with all the files needed to render the Web page just as it first appeared in your browser. Mac users also have the option of saving a Web page as a standalone PDF file that can be viewed with Adobe Reader or Apple's Preview utility.

These methods are fine ways to archive websites you don't want to lose access to, but if you are serious about saving Web pages, go to furl.net and sign up for a free account. Then drag the Furl bookmarklet (the name for a small application that can be saved as a bookmark on your Web browser) into your Bookmarks Toolbar menu. Afterward, when you visit a website and find a page that you want to save, click the Furl bookmarklet and fill out as much information as you wish in the pop-up window. You can give the page a rating, a topic of your own choosing, keywords, comments, and a clipping from the text of the site. When you click Save, the page will be saved to your Furl archive.