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.

Read the original:
Snowden: How to protect yourself from mass surveillance

Chris Davies

Following Edward Snowden's call for internet users to encrypt everything as a matter of course is likely to make you an even bigger target for the NSA, activist journalist Glenn Greenwald has warned, arguing that the stance inside the spying agency is that those protecting their data are inherently suspicious. "If you want to hide what you're saying from them" Greenwald said during a video appearance at SXSW this week, "it must mean that what you're saying is a bad thing," the former Guardian writer said the National Security Agency's assumptions.

Snowden had put out a call for the tech-savvy attendees of SXSW to factor in end-to-end encryption as the default, not as an option, for software and services, pointing out that such a strategy would remove the low-hanging fruit from the NSA in terms of monitoring. Snowden had appeared on a panel of his own, also attending virtually via a video call.

Rather than being able to tap straight into the mass of internet traffic, gathering huge quantities of innocent user-data along the way, the security Agency would be forced to target specific computers of persons-of-interest, the former security contractor turned whistleblower argued.

Failing that, Snowden pointed out that internet users themselves should take privacy into their own hands, encrypting hard-drives, installing tracker-blocking plugins for browsers, and running their web activities through Tor.

Doing that, however, will likely raise your profile with the NSA, Greenwald warned during his panel, VentureBeat reports, however. One of three journalists to get the raw files leaked by Snowden, he says his impression from sifting through the masses of information is that the NSA views any attempt at secrecy as suspicious.

"They view the use of encryption ... as evidence that you're suspicious and can actually target you if you use it" he said.

According to Greenwald, the general perception of how tricky encryption and other basic security techniques are has meant that the relative few who go through with turning it on are more obvious in the mass of data the NSA gathers. That can make them the first to be targeted.

Meanwhile, secured devices like the Blackphone launched at Mobile World Congress last month, or Boeing's similar Black handset, are available but remain niche and generally misunderstood.

Of course, there are legal ways that government agencies can gain access to an individual's data, but encryption by default does at least offer some degree of reassurance that files are safe from mass trawling of internet traffic. The NSA has tried to crack systems like Tor, but so far the re-routing approach has proved resilient to attempts to tap into it, experts say.

Originally posted here:
Encryption makes you an NSA target expert warns