Bruce Schneier, one our best independent security experts, has some useful advice on staying safe from NSA surveillance. He is working with the Guardian and has access to the Snowden documents so he can bring some reasoned analysis to the situation. The short story is that the math behind modern encryption is still sound and that the NSA’s reported “breakthroughs” almost certainly involve attacks on implementations, stealing or coercing the private keys of service providers, and the weakening of crypto standards.
He offers 5 things you can do to keep yourself safe. You can read his advice at the link but the TL;DR is encrypt your data and communications with open source software. The open source part is crucial given that the NSA has reportedly influenced major vendors to build in backdoors or weaknesses. Open source doesn’t provide absolute protection against this, of course, but it does make it much harder to sneak weaknesses into the system.
Schneier’s article is a good recapitulation of where we, as users and NSA targets, stand today and what steps we can take to keep our private matters private. It’s a good read. Recommended.