If anyone here has recently been following the Snowden NSA revelations, it may seem like the NSA has a giant magnifying glass on our lives online. Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and I am sure other companies have allowed the NSA to “Hoover” our data indiscriminately. But there are steps you can take to regain however much privacy as you want. Please consider attending our Online Activist Training Seminar on Sunday September 8th 2013. Otherwise known as a cryptoparty, I can show you how to begin reclaiming your online privacy by using free, open source software such as what is available at http://www.prism-break.org . It will be held at [12:00] noon at 1101 Hamilton street, 3^rd floor, Allentown PA. If you do plan to attend, please either pm me or send an email to louarrealchangedotus so I know how many to expect. Though the event is free, please consider bringing your own refreshments, sodas, and definitely a laptop or smartphone to work with, as this is intended to be a “hands on” seminar lasting at least 3 or 4 hours. Thank you for looking. Stay safe out there.

Today, I break my rule on not posting a picture of my face on the Internet. As you may see, I have a reason. Below, I am pictured with Congressman Charles Dent, whom I met last evening at the Allentown Jewish Community Center, as he was having a “Town Hall” meeting. Though he reminds me of former President George W. Bush, I give him credit for standing up in front of an small and unfiltered crowd and engaging them without visible notes. The local Tea Party was there, grilling Dent on Obamacare, sometimes quite loudly. I got the chance to ask him a question. “How can you reconcile the 4^th Amendment with the NSA data collection issues?” His answer? :We must be careful, as we need to protect America from terrorists.” Both question and answers were taken out of context, but the gist of his position is he wants to compromise on the NSA collections issues as opposed to supporting the 1^st and 4^th Amendment. His answers bothers me. They bother me because it shows anyone in attendance that he is willing to compromise the Bill of Rights.

What also troubles me is the lack of local media coverage concerning the NSA revelations. However, yesterday the Morning Call in fact did post this, http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/sns-rt-us-usa-security-nsa-20130816,0,6288121.story but there is far more detail available. I encourage the reader to Google for more information to educate yourselves, just don’t Google pipe bomb and backpack together. Today, the Morning Call does report about the town hall, but no mention of my question. Lehigh Valley Live reports on Bradly Manning wanting to live as a woman, and the family minded zone, or WFMZ channel 69, just mentions the town hall. As for the local tea party, they seem more interested in towing the national party concerns with defunding Obamacare more than genuine constitutional issues. Smh

If you are in agreement with my statements above, please consider contacting Congressman Dent and sharing your thoughts as follows:

Office Information for Lehigh and Northampton Counties

3900 Hamilton Boulevard

Suite 207

Allentown, PA 18103

PHONE: (610) 770-3490

FAX: (610) 770-3498

Toll-Free: 866-861-2624

Hours: Monday through Friday 9 AM to 5 PM

Office Information for Berks County

61 N 3rd Street

Hamburg, PA 19526

PHONE: (610) 562-4281

FAX: (610) 562-4352

Hours: Monday through Friday 9AM to 5PM

Office Information for Dauphin County

250 W Chocolate Avenue

Suite 2

Hershey, PA 17033

PHONE: (717) 533-3959

FAX: (717) 533-3979

Hours: MONDAY through THURSDAY —

9 AM to 5 PM; FRIDAY 9 AM to Noon

Office Information for Lebanon County

342 W Main St [Front]

Annville, PA 17003

PHONE: (717) 867-1026

FAX: (717) 867-1540

Hours: Monday through Friday 9 AM to 5 PM

Office Information for Washington, D.C.

2455 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Telephone: 202-225-6411

Fax: 202-226-0778

Hours: Monday through Friday 9AM to 5PM

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

http://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+VPN+providers&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US:IE-Address&ie=&oe=

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/13/06/12/1424238/keeping-your-data-private-from-the-nsa-and-everyone-else

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/13/1632210/ask-slashdot-how-to-bypass-govt-spying-on-cellphones

http://prism-break.org/

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.

Recently, I have begun posting the following to a few discussion groups I have been reading recently:

I wish to expand on the initial page I made at http://realchange.us/the-gist-of-it-all/almost a year ago that describes , in part, how a beneficial change can be made for all. To better understand the words below, I ask the reader to read the web page first, as the words below builds upon that.

I am an ancient Usenet Junkie., but don’t have pity on me. Having first signed onto Usenet long before Endless September began, I feel privileged to have seen and participated in the beginnings of a direct democracy in action. Broken up into hierarchical groups and sub-groups, they began evolving, fighting, arguing, flaming, backstabbing, and copious amounts of trolling as it was, I believe it qualifies for the term democracy. To me, it seems Usenet etiquette was a forming democratic process. It was much like a large, lumbering elephant. Like an elephant, it left great piles of dung wherever it went, but when it moved it was a sight to behold. The level of collaboration Usenet achieved enhanced the lives and understanding of almost everyone involved. Humanity, as a whole, prospered. Sadly, Sporge or spam forgeries, currently renders Usenet challenging but not impossible to use.

Much like our modern media, sporge simply crapifies and manipulates the democratic process within Usenet with half truths, libelous statements, forgeries, etc. which are designed to socially engineer the reader into a targeted opinion or thought process. But wait, all is not lost. There are actually anti spam volunteers policing the newsgroups for spam messages. Though imperfect, a way was found to control sporge in a system that never thought it needed the help.

Corruption, stealing, murder, jealousy, these are the dark side of humanity. Anyone is capable of these actions at any time for any reason. There has never been, and never will be, a way to prevent 100% of all occurrences of human evil. Let the reader examine there own heart for all the needed proof. We think these thoughts every waking moment, and often dream of things we will never speak to anyone about. We are Human. And whatever political solution must involved this concept and take it into account. I mention these things because even politicians are human. Time and again, we all have seen bright people rise with honorable intentions only to succumb to the temptations of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have seen it all before and we will see it all again, unless we can break the cycle.

But you may ask “How can we break the cycle?” The answer begins at http://realchange.us/the-gist-of-it-all which describes an idea I have involving the formation of a securable forum available only to the registered voters and the politicians that serve them. Consisting of free, open source software, All manner of deliberations can occur on this forum anonymously, free from corporate interests, lobbyists, media pundits, and anyone else not in that political district. Just the voters and the serving politician. From the bottom up vantage point of the voter, the voter would be able to anonymously interact with the other voters of the same political district. From the view of the top down, the serving politician would only be able to see and interact with the anonymous constituents they serve. This can be used to effectively micromanage the serving politician Implementing this design can easily begin by a politician “pledging” to support this fully and voluntarily. Some, such as Jeremy Hanson of Vermont and Phil Dodds of Florida, have already tried to run similar campaigns, and so far failed. So, how can this system be built?

On June 1 – 2 2013, there is a nationwide civic hacking campaign called Hack for Change. Located at http://hackforchange.org , it is billed as a nationwide civic hacking gathering where coders, activists, and other people from all over get together and brainstorm various applications and software products that take advantage of public databases. I am intending to lead a development team to design the software infrastructure to attempt to bring this whole idea to fruition. If anyone here is interested in directly participating, please contact me directly. You can also join our working chat room at irc.freenode.net in the room #realchange. I’ll be the one with the loose screw.

I heard it said earlier today “Jobs are an unintended consequence of the quest for profit.If we stop demonizing the quest for profit, the inevitable consequence would be a return of jobs.” That got me to thinking on the points below:

The quest for profit is the quest for power. And as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. How does the unbridled quest for profit hurt us all?

 1. The quest for profits forced the music and movie industries to bribe congress to enact the DMCA and to push them to enact the SOPA / ACTA bills in order to censor the internet

 2. The quest for profits is what forces companies like Dow chemical to cut corners by dumping toxic waste in the Love Canal.

 3. The quest for profits is what keeps lobbyists plying there trade in the halls of congress so that, for $500 and up, these people get the ears of people who should be listening to us instead.

 4 The quest for profits is why modern unions find themselves battered, bruised, and in Wisconsin outlawed. Unions arose over 100 years ago to battle against greedy corporations and there practice of paying low wages and no health benefits. Sound familiar?

 5 The quest for profit is what drives mining companies to strip the tops of mountains in West Virginia in search of coal and other minerals.

 6. The quest for profits is what keeps the bulk of companies like Apple’s money offshore so they don’t have to pay tax on it.

7. The quest for profits is why Foxconn uses child labor and is such a terrible place to work,  the workers there riot in response to the horrible working conditions there.

Until abuses like these can be prevented consistently, we can never be free of modern corporations and there ability to hurt us all. Please remember this on Election Day.