A portable "anonymity tool" shaped like a USB thumb drive allows users to browse the Internet anonymously and free from spying by anyone or anything.

Called the "ICLOAK Stik," the device works on computers running the Windows, Linux or Mac operating systems. It's made by Florida-based tech firm DigiThinkIT, Inc.

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The privacy-enabling device was developed in response to the widespread spying by the U.S. National Security Agency or NSA, said Digithinkit CEO Eric Delisle.

Delisle said he wanted to create something his non-tech friends could use to protect themselves against the sophisticated and widespread spying by the NSA or any other spies.

"I just felt like, you know, this sucks. And it sucks even worse for my friends and family who I know are not technically literate like I am," he said.

ICLOAK Stik enables a computer to surf on "TOR networks" using the computer's RAM or temporary memory instead of allowing Web information to download on its hard drive.

Tor is free software that enables online anonymity and resists censorship. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than 5,000 relays to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

Using TOR makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user. The TOR website is at https://www.torproject.org/.

Delisle said ICLOAK completely masks a user's internet service provider address. The result is that the pages a user clicks is made to appear as if the initiating address is in a completely different location to anyone spying on this user.

In other words, all of a user's data traffic is forced over TOR or I2P anonymizing networks making a user appear to be somewhere else than where the user really is.

ICLOAK gives a user the ability to choose a country he wants to appear to be in. It will also automatically create a new, random MAC address (the hardware identifier for the device a user is connecting with) every time a user connects to any network.

More important, Delisle said, ICLOAK will not leave any trace of a user's browsing activities on any computer he uses.

He said there will be no cookies, no browser history, no user IDs, no log files, no registry entries, "Nothing."

He noted that ICLOAK protects against identity theft; key-logging software that records keystrokes; the silent monitoring of a computer's camera and microphone; IP address recording; spying on a user's browsing and download history and email hacking using malicious cookies, among others.

TagsPrivacy, Usb stick, privacy gadget, ICLOAK stik, Tor project