[netwrkranger]

My opinions on the matters:

Does anyone have any advice on how to secure their indentity on-line?

First off, there is the matter of the line and who paid for the service. In who's name is the service? One way to address that issue is to have a strawman (third party) pay for the line, but the line is connected to your residence....

Second, the line is using public access from your house to the Central Office (CO). The CO is owned by a corporation who is a creature of government. Not to mention the surveillance programs going on Internet backbones...

Some basic things you can do are use SSL whenever you can. Also, you can do your Internet surfing from a RAMDrive or a Live Boot Linux CD to ensure you leave no tracks on your machine. Also, software harddrive shredders are good to use on a periodic basis. I would recommend using Firefox or Opera for a browser. There are security plug-ins you can install in your Firefox browser.

I'd like to use an off shore server from a country with no Information Sharing Agreement/Treaty w/ the US, Inc. Pay them with a Post Office Money Order.

That may be a little difficult to do, but you do have the option of searching for free proxy servers or using Tor (Tor is slow for surfing though). There is also the issue of who is the owner of the service and what agreements (explicit or implicit) they have with government agencies.

Use a free email account, again from an off shore country.

Encrypt my email communications.

For e-mail encryption, I like FireGPG. Works with Google Mail too.

I'd like to ensure my surfing and posting to message boards is untracable.

Find proxy servers or use Tor. I recommend Tor.

Privatize and Encrpyt Chat/IM.

For IM encryption, there are third party encryption tools. Just query for IM encryption. My preference is to use Trillian since they have encryption built into the IM software.

And prevent anyone from hacking into my emails and hard drive.

If your e-mails are housed by a third-party provider, then they are at risk for public exposure. If you want to encrypt your harddrive, you could use Truecrypt or switch to Linux and setup an encrypted harddrive partition.

Anyone use any specific software or company?

Some of the best encryption and security tools are free. You can find them on the Internet. If you go with other third-party solutions, it will cost you.

Anyone know what countries could be trusted?

I am not sure if any countries can be trusted. No security is foolproof. Anyone with sufficient time, energy, resources, and determination can break any security measures. It is often said the most secure server is one not connected to the Internet.