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No security anymore?

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The revelations of the NSA’s underhanded activities have been mind-blowing in number and in scope. I was deeply disturbed by them even before they had a direct effect on me.

The day before I left for Canada, the email service I’d been using for several years shut down for good. Turns out that Edward Snowden was also a Lavabit user, and our government approached Lavabit’s owner with a secret order that he bravely refused to comply with.

When I returned home, I searched for a replacement from this list of Privacy-Conscious Email Services. I ended up choosing Neomailbox because I can use my domain name with their service and because they seem willing and able to protect their users’ privacy. They keep only limited logs, strip IP addresses from outgoing messages, and have up-to-date SSL support; also, they’re outside the US and the EU in a country with strong privacy laws (Switzerland).

Aside: At the same time, I decided to see whether IMAP was right for me, since people are fond of hating on POP. (Don’t believe me? One pro-IMAP site portrays POP users as subhuman.) I had a heck of a time trying to make my email client download messages from an IMAP server and delete them from said server—in other words, to make it behave just like POP. As everyone ought to know, and as that anti-POP site reluctantly admits, there is no advantage of IMAP that can be expressed without the phrase “all of your devices.” Since I typically read and send emails on only one computer, which I back up regularly, I’m the ideal POP user. More to the point of security, I don’t want my messages to stay on someone else’s server forever. I want to own my data.

In addition, I’ve once again started using PGP (read all about it in a previous post). I’ve used encryption with every PGP user I’ve written to (which is no one so far). I’m also signing each outgoing email, so that the recipient can verify that it was (probably) written by me and hasn’t been tampered with. In case anyone is interested, my new PGP key’s fingerprint is 1528 6D07 192A 0F45 D6D6 72FD A6E7 1F37 4940 7812 (or 49407812 for short).

I hear a lot of people saying that caring about their privacy is a waste of time, that they have nothing to hide. I invite these people to send me all of their saved emails and phone records for me to analyze and keep indefinitely.

Others realize that what the NSA is doing is wrong, but say there’s nothing we can do about it. “We can’t do anything about it” is not a resolution, it’s a problem that must be solved. If “we can’t do anything about it,” our democracy is broken.

Encrypting our communications and using services based outside the US will make it a little harder for us to be targets of mass surveillance, but they don’t prevent it from happening in the first place. For that, I’m not aware of what we can do besides donating to organizations that are fighting for our rights (such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and, of course, contacting our representatives.

The last time I was sitting around in an airport waiting for a flight, I wondered if anyone had come up with an optimal way to get people onto an airplane. Now Wired delivers: Airlines Still Trying to Make Passenger Boarding Less Annoying.


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