Tag Archives: Government

WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.

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WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is..

This post by Wil Wheaton is a really great reminder that when you are traveling, and I wouldn’t necessarily just put this as international to Britain but even when visiting the next town or crossing state lines even. Rights are being trampled everywhere you go, wether it be from a out-of-control cop, a bloodthirsty Sheriffs deputy or even a sticky-fingered TSA agent there is no lack of potential thugs, enemies, and thieves in your midst.

There are ways to secure your data and keep it handy as well. Store everything in an encrypted disk image or TrueCrypt archive on a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive and duplicate the same things in your memory sticks. If the thugs take your devices then you can rest assured that all you lost was the material itself, but no content.

I’m surprised that journalists and people who know journalists don’t all use GPG to secure their communications. I would think that if you were a whistleblower or had contact with a whistleblower that these little checkboxes would be foremost on your mind and already checked off.

You can’t trust any government, any cop, or any Vampire to keep their word. This goes for everyone as well, including your carrier and service providers. What should Verizon know? Shit. How about Dropbox? The same. Trust nobody and you’ll be safer than someone who trusted someone else. Trust is earned and right now, very very few people have it.

Encrypt Everything

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Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.