Wiliest Ways to Keep the NSA at Bay

"Whatever the level of cryptography you're using, the NSA can probably break into your home network, install keyloggers and grab whatever they want -- passwords, private PGP keys, screenshots, etc.," said Cyril Soler, a developer on the RetroShare project. "This is always easier than breaking the encryption." Their ability to do that is probably facilitated by backdoors.

The death of online privacy had already been proclaimed long before Edward Snowden landed in the international spotlight, but if it wasn't confirmed back then, Snowden's NSA revelations surely must have extinguished the last vestiges of hope in even the most die-hard optimists.

"We're in a predicament," Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy creator and cofounder and president of Silent Circle, told LinuxInsider. "Everything we do on the Internet is being captured in a vast database -- it's a kind of Panopticon.

"We have to do something about this," added Zimmermann, an Internet Hall of Fame inductee. "We have to push back in policy space as well as use countermeasures like encryption."

Public policy changes rarely happen quickly, of course. In the meantime, those countermeasures are looking more and more like users' best bet.

"I'd recommend making phone calls with Silent Phone," Zimmermann suggested, and "for email, PGP, GnuPG or something like it."

As for other online activities, "there's a lot of things you do on the Internet that leak information," he added. "They're capturing your Web browsing."

SSL and TLS are both protocols Zimmermann recommended using.

In addition, the Tor Web browser is "a good idea," he said. "I would recommend using Tor for visiting any website you would prefer to not have recorded."

On the road, if you're in a place where there may be a lot of interception, Tor or a VPN can help protect privacy, though not all VPNs are equally secure, noted Zimmermann.

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Wiliest Ways to Keep the NSA at Bay