Tag Archives: Privacy

What Does It Take?

Are you angry yet? How about now?1 Footnotes: 1 To be fair, there’s some controversy associated with this claim and it doesn’t even seem possible—given that Linux is open source—until you remember the greatest hack of all time.

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Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to … Continue reading

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The Dark Mail Alliance

Here’s some rare good news from the NSA front: the Lavabit and Silent Circle teams have joined forces to form the Dark Mail Alliance. There are quite a few stories on the Internet about the alliance and what they are … Continue reading

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NSA Recap

The Guardian, which has done almost all the heavy lifting on the ongoing NSA story, has an excellent recapitulation of the story so far and what it means for us. The page is interactive and has snippets of video interviews … Continue reading

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Real Time Internet Monitoring

If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed the spectacle of Tom Matzzie live-tweeting an overheard off-the-record conversation between Ex NSA Director Michael Hayden and a reporter. The hilarity was terminated when a colleague of Hayden called him to warn of … Continue reading

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What Foiled Terrorist Plots?

Rick Falkvinge has a great article that makes an obvious point. We can know for sure that government surveillance has foiled exactly zero terror plots. We know this because planning, let alone carrying out, terror plots is a crime but … Continue reading

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CrptoSeal Shuts Down

The U.S. Government’s overreaching has claimed another victim. The CryptoSeal VPN service has pulled the plug. These are good guys who did everything possible to provide a secure, private VPN service. They didn’t keep logs and could provide authorities only … Continue reading

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The Aaron Swartz Legacy

I’ve written before about Aaron Swartz’s last project, software to enable whistle blowers to communicate with news organizations anonymously. The New Yorker was the first to implement the system. Those with information about government misdeeds finally had a secure way … Continue reading

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NIST and Keccak

I’m a bit of a crypto nerd—though far from a practitioner or expert—so I’m on NIST‘s SHA-3 mailing list. The mailing list’s main purpose was to keep the contestant teams and other interested observers up to date on the competition. … Continue reading

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Air Gaps

Bruce Schneier has an interesting post on setting up an air gap computer. It seems simple: just never connect your computer to the Internet. The problem is a completely isolated computer isn’t much use unless all you want to do … Continue reading

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