Occam's Razor

President Obama says that no one is reading your email. Maybe not in my case because most of my email is not particularly interesting, but I sure as heck don’t like that the government is collecting huge amounts of metadata about me. Metadata (data about data) is really equally as interesting, if not more so, than actual emails and Facebook posts that you make.

Supposedly a secret court oversees all this. But it’s not a good omen when this court rejects only a handful of requests a year, and approves thousands of others. It’s not comforting to know that Big Brother is indeed watching me to keep me safer and that President Obama is as complicit in this mess as everyone else. Most of Congress has little idea what is going on, and those that do are sworn to secrecy. Being vested members of the system, they will have a natural tendency to think that government’s security needs will trump your right to privacy in your daily affairs.

I could possibly be okay with non-US citizens being monitored by the government but not me, no way, not without my explicit consent. I am a citizen, and I have freedoms and an inherent right to privacy. It’s in the Bill of Rights: freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, a.k.a the Fourth Amendment. Any Supreme Court worth its salt would reject Project Prism, identified in leaks by Edward Snowden, as wholly unconstitutional. But it is clear that the NSA is sniffing pretty much every packet of data it can get its hands on, not to mention telephone records, and putting all the metadata into huge hosting centers, and maybe your data as well. It’s not even clear that even with a legal prohibition they would actually stop.

Like many Americans I will be working to enact laws to get the government out of the proactive data collection business of U.S. citizens altogether. I have to admit that the probability of my success is rather low, but it would help dear reader if like me you holler like hell at your elected officials. They need to understand that this is not acceptable at all. And if you are cool with the government reading your email and tracking your online behavior then by all means give them permission to do so. I never did.

There have been a number of depressing articles recently about just how easily the government can collect information about us. Of course, it is not just the government. We are already deeply in bed with services like Google that make fabulous search engines and great email in the cloud products, while developing uncannily eerie portfolios of our behavior more valuable than years of babbling to a clinical psychologist.

If like me you are fed up, you might try a few ways of fighting back. Here are some I know about from reading, my experience and that very useful course I took on networking in graduate school.

First off: email. I am guilty of using Gmail. It sure is convenient to have a decade or so of email in the cloud, accessible anywhere I go. However, if you really want private email, you are going to have to pay for it. More importantly, you need an email host not located in the United States. This way when they get a subpoena from a U.S. court they can just laugh. You pay them so they don’t start serving you advertisements and developing their own psychological profile of you. There is no completely risk free solution, but you need to avoid all the cloud email services and that includes GMail, Yahoo Mail, MSN, Hotmail and the like. Here’s one to try: hushmail.com. They are located in Canada and all email is sent via Secure Socket Layer (https). You can use their free web email but if you prefer secure POP or IMAP access, you got to pay them. Their premium package is $34.99 a year. It’s money well invested. Of course they do have some limitations. You can’t use it for sending out spam or for any illegal purpose, at least for any illegal purpose applicable in British Columbia. And for their free web mail, if you don’t log in at least every three weeks, they’ll remove your account. If you do have a hushmail.com or similar type of account, don’t advertise it on your web site or business cards. You don’t want the NSA to associate you with it.

Like to instant message? Don’t particularly like having the NSA able to listen in? What you need to do is nag your chat partners to use encryption. Of course many providers already provide that, but if they can decode it on their servers when sending it between parties then you are vulnerable. You need a chat client with OTR (“off the record”) functionality. Basically you and your recipient exchange cryptographic keys each of you generate and trade them using the protocol. It takes a little bit of effort and you may have to convince your friend to use Adium (Mac) or Pidgin (PC and other operating systems), and then show them how to use OTR. It’s a relatively painless one-time thing between two parties. Your instant messaging provider won’t be able to decrypt it, and neither will the NSA.

Who doesn’t like surfing the web? You may not like it as much if you can’t use your favorite browser, but if you can deal with Firefox you can install TOR, a browser endorsed by Edward Snowden himself. TOR is a customized version of Firefox with privacy enhancements, so it is built on top of an open-source browser. Essentially it proxies traffic between frequently changing servers, making it hard if not impossible for your browsing to be associated with your address on the Internet. I tested it yesterday. I admit it is a bit slower working through a proxy and some of the security features are annoying (it doesn’t want to retain links or easily import bookmarks). But used religiously and you will seem a G-rated person to the NSA even if you live an R-rated life.

Like your cellular phone service but want it secure? Look into Silent Circle. You can also use it for secure messaging, video chats and email. Also look at Redphone software. Curiously, Redphone was developed with your tax money.

What else can you do? If you don’t like turning over private aspects of yourself you could be very brave and delete your Google, Yahoo and other cloud-based accounts. Remember, the government could request these services to give you all their metadata. I’ll grant you that deleting these accounts is hard because they are so convenient. So save those services for the truly vanilla stuff you wouldn’t mind putting on a postcard.

On my list of things to do is getting rid of accounts on sites that provide specialized services. I mentioned mint.com earlier this year. It’s a neat site but it knows too much about me, including all my account numbers and passwords. It’s going to get deleted soon. I’ll keep my financial stuff in Quicken on my home computer. I’ll backup my files to a spare external hard disk, which is easy enough using my Mac and TimeMachine.

Six years ago I mentioned TrueCrypt. It’s a great way to encrypt your whole hard drive, so even the NSA can’t read it. With many operating systems you can do this with a simple command or two. Look into it.

Mobile devices have all sorts of security issues. At a minimum you can try to use secure socket layer when communicating. Many of the solutions I mention above have mobile equivalents. Use them if you can or keep your mobile life boring and G-rated.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, our worst fears have been confirmed. There is no reason to let the government know more about you than your spouse, but that potential is there. You are being sniffed, cataloged, indexed and, perhaps without a court order, having your digital content analyzed for subversive behavior or anything the government wants to learn about you. Join me in yelling like hell but don’t be a patsy either. Do what you can to keep the government out of your digital life.