Posted on 06/17/2013 11:15:49 AM PDT by ShadowAce
PRISM and Boundless Informant. Don’t you just love names like that. They have a nice ring to them. But do not be fooled. Those are bad for your privacy and, with time, even worse for a true democracy.
But thank heavens for Free Software and those making them available. With much gratitude to them, here are two Free Software services that can help you deal with PRISM and Boundless Informant. Maybe not completely, but a little something is better than nothing.
1. Tor is a well-known anonymizing service. Many privacy-conscious people already use it. According to the official description:
Tor software’s job is to conceal your identity from your recipient, and to conceal your recipient and your content from observers on your end. By itself, Tor does not protect the actual communications content once it leaves the Tor network. This can make it useful against some forms of metadata analysis, but this also means Tor is best used in combination with other tools.
So while Tor by itself is not a complete solution to the problem that PRISM and Boundless Informant and other mass surveillance programs pose, it’s a very important piece to the solution. Other applications that can help make Tor a more complete solution are: Enigmail, TorBirdy, and HTTPS Everywhere. Read more about Tor and PRISM here.
2. Open Whisper is a Free Software project that creates “tools for secure mobile communication and secure mobile storage.” So far, the project has published two Android applications – RedPhone and TextSecure. They are available for download for your Android devices from WhisperSystems.org.
RedPhone is said to provide “end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.”
TextSecure is a replacement for the default messaging applications and encrypts messages on the device, that is, locally, and over the air.
If planned it doesn`t have to be on the same day,in theory, several days or a week long event even, would be a daunting enough prospect.
Me too. I was wondering who else remembered Echelon from back during the Xlinton Administrastion! Remember Jam Echelon Day (or whatever it was called) when everyone on the net was supposed to email the same few paragraphs containing all the alleged keywords that Echelon scanned for?
Ahh, the good ol' days when we didn't whimper and whine, rather we shoved it right back in the Government's faces with good old fashioned civil disobedience.....
ANY Encryption can be cracked, given enough computing power and enough time.
Mind you, when I do PGP, I use a 4096 bit key, as strong as they come. Given current tech, and every computer on the planet, we’re STILL talking nearly a billion years to brute-force it. The only thing more secure than a high-bit dual RSA key is a one-time pad, and THOSE require sharing a document first.
As long as you use a long and complex pass-phrase, and keep it properly safeguarded (i.e. in your head only), it’s as secure as it gets. .
You also have to practice good op-sec. If Fedzilla hacks your computer and gets a copy of your private key, you screwed. Given how many MS-Windows-based zombies out there there are under the control of nefarious individuals unbenowngst to the owners of said computers, I think there is a huge population of folks out there for whom encryption would be nothing but a false sense of security.
Yes and no. Your private key is still useless without the passphrase, and you never, EVER leave that on ANY computer.
I have ONE written copy of the passphrase, in the safe with the rest of my passwords, in as tamper-proof a package as I can make it. My wife has instructions to open it IF something happens to me. . .
My soapbox. The encryption issue isn’t technical - it’s social. The tools for doing proper encryption have existed for a long time (certainly for text anyway). However, society as a whole has not embraced it as a need. I submit until people choose to encrypt messages like “meet you at 11:30 for lunch” as part of their daily routine - we’ll never really get there.
As long as encryption is only done for “special” msgs between “special” correspondents then the encrypted msgs will stick out like a sore thumb.
The analogy has been made that right now everyone is communicating via postcard. Everyone should embrace the idea that communicating by letter (i.e. in an envelope) should be the norm.
Tor won’t work...NSA just needs to run the supernodes and they can track everything. And since you’re using TOR you’ll be more closely watched.
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