Snowden: How to protect yourself from mass surveillance

Austin, Texas (dpa) Encryption is still effective at thwarting surveillance, and internet users can protect their privacy with a variety of easy-to-use tools, fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden said Monday.

The bottom line and I repeated this again and again is that encryption does work, said Snowden, speaking to the South by Southwest Interactive conference by live videolink from Russia. We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane black art but sort of a basic protection. Its the defence against the dark arts in the digital realm.

Snowden advised users to take two major steps to safeguard their digital privacy: encrypt their physical devices to protect them in case theyre seized, and use network encryption to cover their online tracks.

Disk encryption can be achieved using multiple commercially available tools, both software and hardware-based. They encrypt all the data on a device and prevent unauthorized access.

Network encryption involves a number of technologies such as the SSL cryptographic protocols, which are designed to provide secure communications via the use of session keys to encrypt data flowing between the parties.

Snowden recommended the browser plug-ins NoScript (http://dpaq.de/22gas) to block active exploitation attempts in the browser, and Ghostery (http://dpaq.de/zOoR4) to block ads and tracking cookies.

Another essential privacy tool is the use of the so-called mixed routing network TOR (http://dpaq.de/ZcKOI), an anonymity network that routes traffic through a vast system of relays to hide a users location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

If you take those basic steps, you encrypt your hardware and you encrypt your network communications, youre far, far more hardened than the average user, and it becomes very difficult for any sort of a mass surveillance to be applied to you, Snowden said.

Youll still be vulnerable to targeted surveillance, he added. If theres a warrant against you, if the NSAs after you, theyre still going to get you. But mass surveillance, this untargeted, collect-it-all approach, youll be much safer.

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Snowden: How to protect yourself from mass surveillance