Hello again. I apologize in advance for this long post. However, I feel a simple picture or meme will not suffice to express all the information I wish to convey, so here goes.
Glen Greenwald is a reporter for The Guardian, a large daily newspaper based in the United Kingdom. . He is the reporter that Edward Snowden turned to in order to leak out all Edward knew about the NSA vacuum cleaner from when he formerly worked as a technical assistant for the CIA, and as a subcontractor at the NSA for both Dell, and Booz Allen Hamilton. This link should provide the gist of what Glen reports, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/series/glenn-greenwald-security-liberty
What I find interesting is that, with the possible exception of The Washington Post, I see very little of the actual leaked material in the mass media. With these current events in mind, I wish to expand on what I had been discussing on last Sunday’s “East meets West” show , located at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lehigh-valley-coffee-party , about how one can begin to protect themselves while on the internet. Information on PRISM can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
Here is a comparison between Candidate Obama and President Obama, http://iroots.org/2013/06/07/obama-2007-meet-obama-2013/
Want to see some other links related tp PRISM? Check these out.
http://prism.arl.army.mil
http://prism.ogden.disa.mil
http://prism.sd.spawar.navy.mil
http://prism.nrlssc.navy.mil
Most likely they won’t work, but hey.
So, what can be done about this, besides complaining to your elected officials? Read on.
TOR, or The Onion Router, is a popular method of surfing anonymously by appearing to have a constantly changing IP, or Internet Protocol address. However, not all web sites and services work with TOR. Also, there are people who set up malicious exit nodes that can sniff all incoming and outgoing traffic on there exit node. More information can be found at https://www.torproject.org/
Tails is a live, bootable DVD which can be installed to a usb flash drive. Using Tails, it allows you to use the internet anonymously using both TOR and I2P and leaving no trace on the host machine while using state of the art cryptography. This open source project has a very active development cycle, and comes out with a new version roughly every couple of months. It can be found at https://tails.boum.org/
GnuPG, or GNU Privacy Guard, is a free, cross platform, and open source replacement for PGP or Pretty Good Privacy. Invented in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman, PGP is still the standard used throughout the world for encrypting email. More information can be found at http://www.gnupg.org/ or for PGP, http://www.pgp.com Please be aware that PGP is now owned by Symantec, of Norton Antivirus fame.
Truecrypt is a free, cross platform, and source code available software package that can encrypt files on your computer, and offers full disk encryption, More information can be found at http://www.truecrypt.org/
Microsoft Skype has also been named, along with other video chat and IM or Instant Messaging programs. For a free, cross platform, securable, and open sourced chat and video chat application try
https://jitsi.org/ Jitsi uses an encryption algorithm called ZRTP. Developed by Phil Zimmerman, the same fellow who invented PGP back in 1991, this is the actual method used to encrypt video chats.
OpenVPN is an open source software application that implements virtual private network techniques for creating secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities. It is capable of traversing network address translation (NAT) and firewalls Considering what we DON’T know about the NSA’s spying on American citizens, I would suggest not trusting any US based providers as well as doing your homework on the others. Some links to check out are as follows:
http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/
http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/readerpicks/tp/The-Best-VPN-Service-Providers.htm and
If you are using the Android operating system on your smartphone, look on Google Play for apps by “The Guardian Project” that could help make your online activities a little more secure. If you are using Blackberries, they offer some security natively for a little while longer. Apple and Windows mobile users, SOL. Sorry. All phones have a hidden software package called CarrierIQ, which is not easily removable. This is spyware installed by the major carriers on over 150 million smartphones throughout the world. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_IQ
Dropbox was specifically named as one of the internet companies that are in the PRISM program. As with other cloud providers, when anything is uploaded to dropbox, or any other cloud provider, the user forfeits any and all rights to any data uploaded. More info can be found here, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-cloud-computing A free alternative has been created by Bittorrent labs called Sync. This application allows the user to sync all files within a pre selected set of folders across 2 or more computers. This application does not involve a cloud or hosting provider of any kind. More information can be found at http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
Someday, this article will get buried under the weight of all the facebook posts that will follow this. I will also post this at http://lehighvalleycoffeeparty.org as well as http://www.realchange.us/protect–yourself As new technologies become available, I will be updating this post as new information becomes available. . If the reader finds any new methods I did not list, please share. Thank you.
Below, I post a few links that will allow the reader to explore there options further. Enjoy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/13/1632210/ask-slashdot-how-to-bypass-govt-spying-on-cellphones
And last, consider supporting this group because they fight for all of us, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/what-we-need-to-know-about-prism
The best tool out there that you can use to secure your internet usage is COMMON SENSE. Since asking spooks to be honest in today’s America is a sad joke, you should safely assume everything you do on the internet is monitored, logged, and analyzed in triplicate, at 7 different locations simultaneously, with off-site backups 12 times a day, and twice as often on Sunday, all on the NSA’s watch board by Monday. I can’t stress this enough, DO YOUR HOMEWORK when it comes to using any internet security product. Stay safe out there, and please don’t do anything stupid. Because I will not be held responsible when you get caught. Having said that, I believe if everyone using the Internets uses these tools with common sense, the NSA’s snoopers and vacuums would bog down under the weight of it all. Have a nice day.