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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ibnanv" data-source="post: 15159823" data-attributes="member: 218596">How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing From Government Surveillance                                    How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing From Government Surveillance                                            <a href="http://www.theindependent.lk/media/k2/items/cache/680adb7a7e18109a051baa880e0f91c5_XL.jpg" target="_blank">                   <img src="http://www.theindependent.lk/media/k2/items/cache/680adb7a7e18109a051baa880e0f91c5_M.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />               </a>                                                                                                If you have  followed the startling revelations about the scope of the U.S.  government’s surveillance efforts in recent days, you may have thought  you were reading about the end of privacy. But even when faced with the  most ubiquitous of modern surveillance, there are ways to keep your  communications away from prying eyes. Want to hide your communications from the NSA? On Thursday, the Washington Post and the  Guardian revealed a top-secret National Security Agency program called  PRISM, which reportedly involves mining private data from the servers of  companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo. The  tech giants have denied participating in the program—but according to a  leaked set of NSA slides, PRISM involves the monitoring of emails, file  transfers, photos, videos, chats, and even live surveillance of search  terms. Separate disclosures have revealed that the NSA is scooping up  millions of phone records from at least three major phone networks in  the United States, using the data as part of program the White House  says is aimed at finding terrorists.                                             Not  every communication can be tracked and eavesdropped on by the  government, however, and there are ways to reduce the chances of being  snooped on. First, instead of browsing the Internet in a way that  reveals your IP address, you can mask your identity by using an  anonymizing tool like Tor or by connecting to the Web using a Virtual  Private Network. Additionally, you can avoid Google search by using an  alternative like Ixquick, which has solid privacy credentials and says  it does not log any IP addresses or search terms or share information  with third parties. When it comes to sending emails, if  you are using a commercial provider that has been linked to the PRISM  spy initiative, you can throw a spanner in the NSA’s works by learning  how to send and receive encrypted emails. PGP or its free cousin GPG are  considered the standard for email security, and these can be used to  both encrypt and decrypt messages—meaning you can thwart surveillance  unless you are unlucky enough to have Trojan spyware installed on your  computer. Novice computer users learning how  to use PGP or GPG may find it a daunting prospect at first, but there  are plenty of tutorials online for both Mac and Windows users that can  help guide you through the process. For journalists working with  confidential sources, attorneys seeking to ensure attorney–client  privilege, or others whose work requires secure communications, learning  how to use PGP or GPG is an absolute necessity in 2013. Organizations  seeking to protect themselves from email grabs could go one step  further: They could take more control of their messages by setting up  their own email server instead of relying on a third-party service,  helping ensure no secret court orders can be filed to gain covert access  to confidential files. And if you need to store private documents  online, you can use Cloudfogger in conjunction with Dropbox. For instant messaging and online  phone or video chats, you can avoid Microsoft and Google services like  Skype and Gchat by adopting more secure alternatives. Jitsi can be used  for peer-to-peer encrypted video calls, and for encrypted instant  message chats you can try using an “off the record” plugin with Pidgin  for Windows users or Adium for Mac. Like using PGP encryption, both  Pidgin and Adium can take a little bit of work to set up—but there are  tutorials to help ease the pain, like this for setting up Adium and this  tutorial for Pidgin. As for phone calls, if you want to  shield against eavesdropping or stop the NSA obtaining records of who  you are calling and when, there are a few options. You could use an  encryption app like Silent Circle to make and receive encrypted calls  and send encrypted texts and files, though your communications will be  fully secure only if both parties to the call, text or file transfer are  using the app. Other than Silent Circle, you could try RedPhone for  making encrypted calls or TextSecure for sending encrypted texts. In an unprecedented report published  Tuesday, the United Nations special envoy on free expression warned  that due to advances in technology, governments’ effectiveness in  conducting surveillance is “no longer limited by scale or duration.” Two  days later, the coincidental disclosures about the NSA’s phone records  grab and PRISM program seemed to hammer home the envoy’s point: A new  frontier of sweeping secret surveillance is not a conspiracy theory but a  burgeoning reality. However, it is not an Orwellian dystopia—at least  not yet. Tools to circumvent government monitoring exist and are freely  available. The onus is on us as individuals to learn how to use and  adopt them.</blockquote>

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