Irreal

If you’re looking for ways to make your Internet activities more opaque, here’s a very useful site that discusses alternative software to help you be more secure. It also discusses phone services that may help too.

Most of us, of course, are not terrorists or doing anything illegal but that doesn’t mean we’re fine with having extra-legal snooping into our activities. As someone aptly put it, everyone knows what goes on in the bathroom but that doesn’t mean we want people snooping on us when we’re there.

This site is a great resource and you should bookmark it against the day that you need one or more of the services it discusses. I, for example, am not yet ready to give up iOS and OS X but:

1. I can still use Tor and other utilities to protect my online activities.
2. If, in the future, I do need to give up my current system, this site has good suggestions as to where to go.

Update: use → us

Jamie Zawinski links to a frightening response to a post on Reddit that offered the usual tripe about not caring about government surveillance because “I have nothing to hide.” The responder purports to be living in an Arab country that is “generally assumed to be a dictatorship.” He remarks that the purpose of surveillance is not to control terrorism but to control enemies of the state. That is, those who would destabilize the status quo.

He tells the fable of a young man who idealistically goes to a protest against inhumane farming practices and the consequences that follow. The story is certainly apocryphal but the poster insists that all the things he describes actually happened to friends of his. His final warning is that this is coming to a country near you regardless of how impossible it seems.

Perhaps this is alarmist. Perhaps not. One thing for sure, there is no reason to allow the government to assemble (or perhaps worse, maintain) a surveillance state. As the poster says, if this administration doesn’t use it for evil purposes, a future one will.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed suit in Federal Court on behalf of 19 organizations. The suit asks that the court rule that the NSA mass surveillance violates the first, fourth, and fifth amendments to the U.S. Constitution and seeks relief in the form of an injunction ordering the NSA to cease their over-broad data collection and return the illegally obtained data to its owners. It’s worth reading the actual filing to help understand the issues at stake as the EFF sees them.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. Concomitant with the suit, the EFF is having a membership drive and I’d like you to consider joining. Membership starts at $25. If you can’t afford that, send them $5 or $10 to help them carry on their work.

You hear a lot about the EFF so it’s easy to believe that it’s a huge organization but, in fact, they have only about 20,000 members. That means that every member counts and that they are probably always short of funds. Still, for 23 years they’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting to help safeguard our Internet rights and freedoms. If the recent NSA snooping troubles you, please join. You’ll be on the side of the angels. If you don’t live in the U.S., consider donating or joining the equivalent organization in your country.

In my The Good Guys and Bad post, I had harsh words for Microsoft’s collaboration with the NSA and FBI. I still find their actions over the top and inexcusable but there is another side to the story. Declan McCullagh over at CNET explains how the government forces Internet companies to cooperate on surveillance.

The big threat is that the government will install their own equipment on the company’s network if they don’t get cooperation. No one wants that, of course, so they provide the targeted account details using internal mechanisms. Companies that resisted have consistently lost in court.

This, however, does not exonerate these companies, at least not completely. Companies are only required to provide what they can provide. If they don’t keep logs for longer than required for engineering purposes, they can’t tell the government when someone was logged on. If they keep user data encrypted on their servers in such a way that only the user can decrypt it, they can’t give it to the government. None of this is impossible. We can’t expect Google, for instance, to do this because their business model is all about mining their users’ data but other companies can and do.

If you want to keep your business your business you should seek out these companies. I’ve been accumulating a list of such services for my own use and will blog about them occasionally. Realistically, if you become a target of the NSA or FBI¹, they are probably going to get your data but most of us aren’t and won’t be such targets so we can take steps to avoid having our data vacuumed up wholesale. This will also prevent companies like Google and Facebook from building a profile of our Net activities—a profile that itself could easily become a target of government interest.