I’d love to say “Terrorists, you should do this instead…” but I don’t want feds knocking on my door. I don’t support terrorism, however I do support raising public awareness of digital security and mentioning whats working for us is also fighting against us. Through P2P VPN networks, TOR networks, anonymous relays and botnets you can become mostly untraceable.
The layered encryption of TOR would make decoding any digital string a nightmare - including getting a FOIA request out to every ISP that could have possibly routed traffic between TOR peers. Hosting your own TOR network is pretty dang easy as well. It’s also not likely somebody will connect to a privately hosted TOR network, or even know where to look. I personally host my own TOR network and channel IRC and IM sessions from my workplace through my home connection.
You can do a heck of a lot more than that including host your own personal underground Internet. The same goes with Hamachi, however you are not nearly as anonymous. Anybody that wants to stay hidden can easily hop on existing TOR networks and advertise their IRC server to any number of recipients. It’s my impression that if you are computer smart enough to use Skype, you are smart enough to use IRC sessions under TOR, or even talk through SSH sessions on *nix machines.
The possibilities to protect your transmissions are endless. The verification methods between yourself and others can be quite secure if you understand how it works. By the way, you can tunnel just about anything through anything else.. most people disagree since there is no QOS and it’s highly latent and inefficient. Remind yourself not to disagree or ignore silly methods of doing things just because you wouldn’t want to do things that way.