Vinay Gupta’s “Snowden” piece got me all riled up.
America are no longer even slightly plausibly the good guys. They’re using the internet against everybody – their own citizens, their allies, the European parliament. They’re storing everything.The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution
As a cyber-security consultant, this entire situation bothers me. My ability to do my work depends on trust. My clients have to trust me with a lot of sensitive information. I have to trust the tools and systems that I use to do my work. Trust is an essential element. I think the NSA has betrayed the trust of all US citizens.
The police tend to think that those who evade surveillance are criminals. Yet the evasion may only be a protest against the surveillance itself. Faced with the growing surveillance capacities of the government, some people object. They buy "burners" (prepaid phones) or "freedom phones" from Asia that have had all tracking devices removed, or they hide their smartphones in ad hoc Faraday cages that block their signals. They use to surf the internet. They identify tracking devices with GPS detectors. They avoid credit cards and choose cash, prepaid debit cards, or bitcoins. They burn their garbage. At the extreme end, some “live off the grid" and cut off all contact with the modern world. [Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2285095 “Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion”)
I have acquired a certificate for signing and encrypting me email communications. My public key is attached to all my email. I suggest you get a certificate and start encrypting your sensitive emails. I have.
You can get an email pubic key certificate from Comodo. I wrote an article a few years ago on how to do setup email certs on OS X and then transfer the certificate to iOS .
I reconsidering my relationship with social media (Facebook and Google+ mostly). iMessage and FaceTime may be better than Skype and Google Talk.
“We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order.” [Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy](http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/ “Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy”)
