A Year After Snowden's Disclosures, EFF, FSF Want You To Fight Surveillance 108
Today, as the EFF notes, marks one year from Edward Snowden's first document leaks, and the group is using that as a good spur to install free software intended to make it harder for anyone (the NSA is certainly not the first, and arguably far from the worst) to spy on your electronic communications. Nowadays, that means nearly everything besides face-to-face communication, or paper shipped through the world's postal systems. Reader gnujoshua (540710) highlights one of the options: 'The FSF has published a (rather beautiful) infographic and guide to encrypting your email using GnuPG. In their blog post announcing the guide they write: "One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA's massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA's job a little harder.'" Serendipitous timing: a year and a day ago, we mentioned a UN report that made explicit the seemingly obvious truth that undue government surveillance, besides being an affront in itself, chills free speech. (Edward Snowden agrees.)
Re:No point encrypting if you're the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No point encrypting if you're the only one... (Score:2, Informative)
Do people using it know that their messages are encrypted? Probably not.
Are their messages encrypted? Probably not. [cnet.com]
Easy enough your grandma can't do it.
Great article wrong on paper mail being safe (Score:5, Informative)
"Nowadays, that means nearly everything besides face-to-face communication, or paper shipped through the world's postal systems."
As shown here - every single piece of 1st class mail in the U.S. is photographed (and probably handed over to the FBI or NSA or whomever started this stupid program up in the first place to get the Post Office to do that):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07... [nytimes.com]
Short of radical political reform, which seems a long shot in the U.S. in the near term - technical solutions coming from open software will be the few ways we can restore some privacy to communications.