So: How exactly can you use the Internet safely?
Give up on that notion. You can’t. Especially if you’re investigating any touchy areas, say, potential nuclear operations in Iran, or Uigur rights in China, or Hamas operations in the West Bank. In other words, there are a lot of reasons besides criminal exploits for treading carefully.
Since you might indeed want to decouple your searches or visits to websites, the only real question is, how can you do it? One of the most clever solutions to date is an Onion Router. Check out the Wikipedia entry at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_router. Basically, it’s a technique to apply multiple layers of encryption to a Internet packets, then route them through a maze of routers which strip off encryption one layer at a time to reveal the next stage of routing instructions.
To date the most notable implementation is Tor (http://www.torproject.org/). You can download packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and other Unixes, or source code if you like that sort of thing, and get started immediately.
It’s important to realize that traffic enters and exits the Tor network unencrypted, unless you apply encryption before your data even leaves your computer. AND: the hosts providing those routers, particularly the exit router in your transmission, have a truly good shot at scanning your traffic. (I’ve wondered just how worthwhile it might be for certain parties to host Tor routers just so they can snoop exiting traffic.) Justs don’t imagine you’re protected by end-to-end encryption. You’re not. That’s not what an Onion Router does.
What an Onion Router *does* do is disguise the source point of a request. If you’re mining Islamist websites for terrorist links, this might be a pretty good idea. Or if you’re indulging your Victoria’s Secret fetish. Whatever your reasons, add this tool to your box, and use when appropriate. Good luck.