Internet privacy – Page 2

Sousveillance?

Source: Stephanie Mann, age 6, via Wikipedia

Periodically I check out the web site of David Brin, a science fiction writer and futurist, to see what’s on his mind. Brin is the author of the brilliant and classic Startide Rising (1983), which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards the year it was published. But, smart as Brin is, I find that I usually disagree with him. This is because I put him in the unpleasant category of techno-utopians — people who think that technology will solve all our problems, including our energy problems and even our political problems. I think that is bunk, and dangerous bunk.

Brin had linked to a piece he wrote in “The European” in which he argues that the solution to growing surveillance and invasion of privacy is “sousveillance.” The word “sousveillance” is a made-up word and is the opposite of surveillance. It means spying up at elites the same way they spy down on us. The prefix “sur” of course comes from a French word meaning over, or above; and “sous” is another French word meaning under, or beneath.

This notion that sousveillance is an effective antidote to surveillance seems to me to be so obviously silly that I’m inclined to think that the techno-utopians are even more deluded than I had thought. Just give everyone a Google glass and we’ll fix the world’s surveillance problem!

First of all, there is a straw man fallacy: “… [F]or the illusory fantasy of absolute privacy has to come to an end.” Who said anything about absolute privacy? There has never been such a thing as absolute privacy in American society or American law. The law and the Constitution are almost silent on the issue of privacy. But there have been lots of lawsuits having to do with privacy, and as far as the courts are concerned the issue is pretty settled.

But the second and biggest point of silliness is the notion that we small people have the same power to spy on elites that they have to spy on us. Yes, sometimes it happens. The photo of the cop pepper-spraying a group of already restrained protesters held our national attention for weeks. That was a fine example of sousveillance — someone had a camera ready at the right time. Another brilliant lick of sousveillance was when a waiter (or someone) at a Romney fund-raising event for rich people secretly made a tape of Romney trashing 47 percent of the American people as “takers.” It helped expose Romney as a servant of the rich, and it helped him lose the election.

Edward Snowden’s spying on the spies, then releasing the evidence to the media and to Wikileaks, is the all-time best example of sousveillance. Because of the actions of one very clever nerd, the elites caught red-handed are still squawking and trying to lie their way out it. We got some very useful information on how elites’ surveillance systems operate, though that information will soon enough be obsolete.

But as brilliant as these coups of sousveillance were, such things are always going to be rare and accidental. That is because elites have systems for secrecy that we little people will never have. They are rich, they are ruthless, and they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (most of it our own tax money) to build walls of secrecy around themselves while monitoring everything we do. The idea that the little cameras in our phones, or built into our glasses, can fix this is seriously dumb. Nevertheless, we need to always keep our cameras handy, and we must be creative in coming up with new ways to spy on elites.

Dumb cop: Nailed by the camera!

Dumb politician: Nailed by the camera!

VPN security on all your devices

I have been using VPN encryption on my iMac since October 2011. It has worked great. The company that I signed up with — Private Tunnel — now has apps for iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android, along with the Windows and Macintosh versions.

I’ve written about VPN (virtual private networks) many times in the past as a form of basic computer security that I think we all need. When using a VPN connection on your computer (or smartphone), all Internet traffic into and out of your device is encrypted and sent to your VPN provider’s servers. There it is decrypted, and all your travels on the Internet appear to come from their servers. The sites you are browsing don’t know your real IP address. And your Internet Service Provider (Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) have no way to monitor or track what you’re doing on the Internet, since all your data is encrypted when it passes through their systems.

Private Tunnel has continued to improve their service since I signed up in 2011. I have very rarely had any trouble with it. They’ve also added new servers in Canada and Switzerland, plus a new server in Chicago, in addition to the servers they had in 2011 — San Jose (California) and London. You can choose which of these servers you’d like to use and switch among them as you please. This means that, if you choose, all the sites you visit on the Internet think you are in Switzerland (or whichever server location you choose).

The service costs $10 for 50 gigabytes of data. There is no time limit for using the data. When you run out, you buy more. That much data lasted me a year. You can pay with a credit card, but you also can pay with PayPal, which I think is more secure for Internet transactions. Your iPhone or Android app uses the same Private Tunnel account and draws on the same pool of data.

I have tried other VPN apps on the iPad and iPhone, but they did not work as well as Private Tunnel. The other apps disconnected from VPN every time the device went to sleep, which meant that you had to constantly reconnect. But the Private Tunnel app stays connected as long as the app is running in the background.

I believe I can now reach my goal of encrypting 100 percent of my Internet traffic.

Narc'ed out by gmail

Click on the image above for a high-res version

The media today are focusing on the downfall of David Petraeus, the former CIA director. The Atlantic has a piece on how the FBI snooped on Petraeus and his mistress. It was from identifying information in the header of Google email.

All email has a header. Most email programs show only the “To:”, “From:”, and “Subject:” fields, etc. But there are other fields that give information about the computers that sent and received the email as it made its way across the Internet. In the example above, I have grayed out the parts that identify me and put a red stripe over the part that identifies the sender. (Click on the image for an enlarged, more readable version.) The email above was sent by a computer with the IP address 178.248.187.57. A “traceroute” command (any nerd knows how to do a traceroute command) shows that that IP address is in Paris.

By default, all email servers include this information, as far as I know. The only way to avoid it is to stay away from corporate email and free email services such as Google or Yahoo. There are paid email services that are more secure. For example, Neomailbox.com offers an email service that suppresses this information. Their servers also are offshore, in Switzerland. That will cost you about $50 a year.

It blows my mind that a CIA director would be so stupid as to allow career-destroying email to touch Google’s gmail servers. Not only does gmail include identifying information in the headers, Google also will happily turn your email over to any goon who asks for it — local, state, or national. And when you sign up for Google’s gmail you give Google permission to read it all — incoming and outgoing — to build a dossier on you.

You get what you pay for. Use gmail and Yahoo at your own risk.

Here are some guidelines for secure use of email:

1. Don’t use free email services such as Google or Yahoo.

2. Never use your work email for anything that would embarrass you or anyone else.

3. Don’t allow your email to be archived on someone else’s server. If you use IMAP, your email is being archived. POP3 is more secure, because the mail can be deleted off the server a day or two after it is downloaded to your computer.

4. Consider a secure, offshore email service such as Neomailbox.com.

5. Consider encrypting your email with an email client such as Thunderbird, which supports a PGP encryption plug-in. A PGP encryption plug-in also is available for the Macintosh mail program.

6. Never forget that when your email crosses the Internet, it’s like a postcard in the mail — anyone who has access to the servers and routers that handle the email can read it, because it’s clear text. A typical email may pass through a dozen or more routers on its way to its destination. It’s also commonly assumed that the U.S. government is capturing and storing a copy of virtually everything that travels over the Internet. If that’s true, encryption is the only defense. Setting up encryption is not that hard, but I’ve never been able to persuade a single person to do it.

Reuters

Julian Assange

“Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” — Julian Assange

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my constant refrains is that Americans are now the most propagandized people in the world. Whenever I say this, I also say that I’m not just throwing a rhetorical grenade. I am being completely serious. My constant concern is that, because of the failure of our media, we know very little about what is actually going on in the world. Instead, we get a constant blare of distraction, drivel, and misinformation. They tell us what they want us to know, and anything else is difficult or impossible to get. Assange expresses my precise concern: that without accurate information, we cannot understand the true state of the world or plan for our own future.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are probably the most powerful forces in the world today, damaged though they are, that are operating to break through the lies and secrecy and get real information to people. Because of that, Assange is criminalized and hounded.

I’m posting links to a 40-minute interview with Assange last year, by Russia Today. This interview is by no means out of date, and it provides important background on the drama now playing out in London, with Assange holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy.

The ironies are incredible:

— That in our times, only a Russian organization is independent enough of U.S. and Western interests to bring us this interview. Please note that I do not allege that the Russian media tell the truth about Russia; far from it. But they can tell the truth about the United States, because they are not in our orbit or under our thumb. Nor do they need to propagandize, because the unadorned, unspun truth is so powerful on its own.

— Note how civil and intelligent this interview is — quite unlike anything on American television. No one shouts, no one interrupts. The interviewer asks excellent questions in an intelligent sequence, then listens silently, giving Assange plenty of time to respond.

— Note that no one is spinning — neither the interviewer for Russia Today, nor Assange.

I defy anyone to disprove any of the hundreds of facts that Assange covers in this interview. He is no idealogue. He is simply a truth teller. I have often said that the best journalists, the real journalists, are people who find it pretty much impossible to lie because of an honor for the truth that is almost religious. There are very few journalists like that anymore. Most journalists today are simply too weak to resist the forces that have degraded and corrupted the media. They are all equally cowed, they all sing the same song, and they all think they’re doing a great job. For those who don’t know me, I should mention that I spent my entire career in the newspaper business, that I know more than my share of (and am ashamed of) the journalists you see on television today, and that I have for decades been an amateur scholar of propaganda.

The first part of the interview deals largely with important events in the Arab world last year. The last half of the interview will be of more interest to Americans, including Assange’s statements about the threat to privacy from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. It’s worth taking the 40 minutes to listen to the entire interview, just to get a feel for the inferiority of the American media and how it deceives us, and to size up Julian Assange as a person.

Here are links to the two-part interview: Part1 — Part 2.

How your privacy is bought and sold

Thanks to a WikiLeaks document dump, we now know more than ever about how private corporations are spying on all of us (unless you’re off the grid) and selling the data to whoever will pay for it, including, of course, governments.

If you use a cell phone or a computer, you are being monitored. One of the leaked documents reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) began building last January a secret $1.5 billion installation in Utah to store “terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.”

This is being reported on security web sites and places where geeks hang on. Here’s a link to the ITWorld story, which has some of the details.

It will be interesting to see what the mainstream media say about this. I’m expecting them to ignore it.

Disk encryption

I’ve written number of articles in the past about ways to protect your privacy on the Internet. I’d like to add a another layer that should be found on the well-defended computer: disk encryption.

Disk encryption is easy. Whether you’re running Windows or a Macintosh, you probably want to do it with TrueCrypt, which is open source and free. With TrueCrypt, you assign a chunk of space on your hard drive to be an encrypted virtual disk. You assign a password that must be used to mount the disk. After the disk is mounted, it’s just like any other disk.

Those who make it their business to snoop on us don’t like disk encryption. At all. Because it’s very hard to break. The Wikipedia article on TrueCrypt describes a case in which the FBI spent 12 months trying to decrypt a disk and failed.

Do law-abiding citizens need things like disk encryption? You decide. I’d argue that now, in the digital era, using technologies that protect our privacy looks a lot like firearms looked to the founding fathers — concerns that led to the Second Amendment. And then there’s the Fourth Amendment with its protections against unreasonable search and seizure. These rights are so important that they’re written into the Constitution. Let’s exercise those rights.

Here’s a basic list of protections that any well-defended computer ought to have. I’ve written about most of these in previous posts:

1. The ability to send encrypted email.

2. A well-defended browser with extensions that block ads, scripts and Flash, and which let you easily control cache and cookies.

3. A proxy system to encrypt all your traffic, prevent your ISP from collecting data on you, and keep your IP address private.

4. Encrypted disk volumes.

5. A secure WIFI network, especially in densely populated places.

All those things can be accomplished with free, open source software.

By the way, a new app for iPad and iPhone was recently released that lets you browse securely through the Tor system. It’s called Covert Browser and costs $2.99.

For my other articles on Internet security, see the “Internet Privacy” category in the column on the right.

Resisting Internet snooping

My cellular antenna, pointed at a Verizon tower for Internet service. Apple found my WIFI and its exact location, even though it’s in the boonies, in the darkness of my attic.

The dark side of the Internet is that it is a big machine increasingly optimized for the invasion of privacy. For example, my WIFI router lives in the dark up in my attic, connected to an “air card” and special antenna that connect me to Verizon for Internet access. My WIFI router is in the woods in a sparsely populated rural area, half a mile from a paved road and a good many miles from a Verizon tower. And yet I discovered yesterday, while experimenting with “location services” on my iPad, that Apple knows the exact location of my WIFI router. How can that be, since my iPad 1 does not have GPS, 3G, or any other means of determining its location?

I had to think for a while and do some research before I figured it out. A friend was here recently with an iPhone equipped with GPS. He was unable to get an AT&T cell phone signal from here, but he did connect to my WIFI router. His cell phone, I now realize, knew its exact location from GPS. It also, of course, knew the unique machine address, or “MAC address,” of my WIFI router. Because “location services” was enabled on his iPhone, the iPhone transmitted my WIFI router’s unique identifier and its exact location to Apple’s databases. Google does something similar. Apple’s and Google’s databases know the exact locations of millions of WIFI routers — public and private — all over the world. If you enable “location services” on an iPhone or iPad, you consent to this. Apple has fully “disclosed” it. Google built its database partly by having vehicles drive through the major streets and roadways, sniffing out WIFI signals, capturing the WIFI systems’ unique identifiers, and transmitting the location back to Google’s database.

So Apple has pinned me. I can’t undo it. My only recourse would be to sell my current router so that someone else is pinned with its location and buy a new, virgin WIFI router. Then I’d have to lock down my router, never use “location services,” and forbid my friends and visitors from connecting to my WIFI system. How likely am I to do that? The first thing visitors want to know these days is whether you’ve got WIFI. Guests expect it, along with clean towels and a mud-free driveway.

Still, I try to do everything that is reasonable and practical to prevent my (totally legal and benign) Internet activity from being logged in corporate databases. This kind of data, from all of us who use the Internet, is now routinely logged, cross-referenced with our names and addresses, and sold — more often to other corporations but also to government and investigative agencies.

Your Internet service provider, this very minute, is almost certainly logging all your web browsing. Your ISP knows everything you do on the Internet. This data is almost certainly kept for a long time, maybe forever.

Is there anything you can do about that?

For a good while, I’ve been looking for a trustworthy “virtual private network,” or VPN, provider that will encrypt all my Internet traffic (making it invisible to my ISP, Verizon), while keeping my IP address private. There are many organizations on the Internet that provide this kind of service, but most of them seem to be part of a shady gray market that mostly serves people who are up to no good.

I think I’ve found a VPN provider that is a respectable business, reasonably priced, with service that is good enough not to slow me down when I’m browsing. In fact, there is evidence that this VPN service actually speeds up my browsing, because Verizon is now intercepting its customers web traffic and sending it through “optimization” servers that attempt to reduce the bandwidth that Verizon customers use. Verizon intercepts only traffic on HTTP port 80, so encrypted VPN on other ports bypasses Verizon’s optimization servers. Verizon has disclosed this.

The software system I’m using is OpenVPN, and the company that provides the service is Private Tunnel. I’ve been using this service for a week now. They provide OpenVPN software for both Mac and Windows. On my Mac, the app is robust and transparent. It uses a tiny amount of CPU. I’m very pleased with it so far. I had a couple of questions for Private Tunnel’s tech support, and they got back to me immediately via email. Though this is not spelled out in Private Tunnel’s terms of service document (it ought to be), I am assured by their tech support department that, though they log incoming connections to their servers and keep those logs for a month or two, they do not log your browsing destinations. And because all your traffic is encrypted by the VPN software, your ISP gleans no data about your activity on the Internet, other than the fact that you have an encrypted connection to a Private Tunnel server.

Do you need something like this? You do only if you don’t want corporate America to collect and resell data about your Internet activity. Also, if you use a laptop or notebook at a public WIFI hot spot, this encryption prevents snoopers at that hot spot from intercepting and stealing passwords, etc., from any unencrypted data that you transmit through that hot spot.

Decorporatizing your life

Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”

One of the many puzzling things about today’s political environment is why so many of the people who distrust government think that corporations can do no wrong. My view is that out-of-control, anti-democracy corporations are far more dangerous than government.

Mind you, I don’t want to totally demonize corporations the way some people totally demonize government. Corporations, if they are reasonably regulated, can do lots of good things — make iPads, for example. But as corporations get richer and more powerful, they want a weak government. They will use their resources, if they can, to take over the government. They will use propaganda to demonize government and keep lots of people from seeing what they’re up to. That is what is happening in the United States today. Corporations are well along in their plan to weaken our government and our democracy and bring about their vision of a dog-eat-dog, corporatized, free-market utopia.

If corporations get their way — and increasingly they are getting their way — government will be powerless to stop them. Already our democracy is too weak to restrain corporations. The Congress regularly passes bills that the majority of Americans clearly don’t want. Instead, Congress passes the bills that corporate lobbyists and big-buck campaign donors want.

What can we do, on our own, to get back at corporations when our democracy fails us?

Here are some suggestions.

1. Get out of debt as quickly as possible, and stay out of debt. Not only will corporations bleed you dry on the costs of servicing your debt, debt limits your choices. It keeps you on the treadmill. It forces you to remain a slave indentured to corporate power. Your debt lets them treat you like a dog, while you are powerless as long as you owe them.

2. Don’t sign contracts. Contracts with corporations these days rarely benefit the little guy. They benefit the corporations. Consider your cell phone contract, for example. You got just a cheap phone out of the deal. The corporation locked you into a long money stream and prevented you from taking advantage of competition.

3. Build up your savings. We need savings to get through unexpected crises, such as loss of a job, or a costly illness. Many people lose their homes to foreclosure, for example, after losing their job or getting sick. With no savings, they are at the mercy of every corporation that has a claim on them. And corporations have no mercy.

4. Spend your money as close to home as possible. Corporations suck money out of our neighborhoods, where it ends up as profits for Wall Street to be invested abroad. If you eat at a chain restaurant, for example, the money goes to Wall Street. But if you eat in a neighborhood restaurant, the money stays in your neighborhood, with your neighbors. Support your local farmers and farmers markets!

5. Cut your consumption. Most Americans buy all kinds of junk that they don’t need. See the Story of Stuff. Buying useless stuff is a waste of your money. It ends up as just more trash in our landfills. And it makes corporations fatter.

6. Don’t let them snoop on you. Corporations see the Internet as a wonderful new way to snoop on, and brainwash, consumers. They’ll track everything you do on the Internet, if you let them. You’ll find articles here and elsewhere on what you can do to prevent this.

7. Don’t let them scam you. Increasingly, diluted regulations and lack of government oversight let corporations scam you, legally or not. There are all kinds of scams, particularly having to do with borrowing or investing money. Half of the junk mail I get has a whiff of scam about it. The housing bubble and bust came about largely because of scams, some of which are actually legal in our deregulated business environment.

8. Don’t let them push you around. Is your bank pushing you around with high fees? Did the dealer try to tack on hidden fees when you bought a car? In how many ways is your credit card lender abusing you? When they try to pull a fast one on you, be smart and push back. Don’t let them take you for even so much as a penny. It’s a matter of principle.

9. Don’t believe their advertising and public relations. Corporations spend billions of dollars to make us think they’re nice. Oil companies, for example, love to make commercials about how “green” they are. It’s all bunk.

10. Cut off the propaganda. Virtually everything on radio, television, and cable these days is propaganda. At the very best, it’s low-grade information or mere infotainment. Those people who get their “news” by watching television are guaranteed to be ill-informed and besotted with propaganda. Not only that, but people like Rupert Murdoch make billions of dollars selling propaganda to people on his cable networks. Americans actually pay for their propaganda! Cut off your cable or satellite TV. The only way to be well-informed is to read, not to watch.

11. Don’t outsource to corporate America what you can do for yourself. Every time you take a ready-made supper dish out of your freezer and pop it in your microwave, you’ve outsourced your cooking to a corporation. Your supper cost you five or ten times as much as it should have. You ate all kinds of chemicals and cheap ingredients. A corporation got the profit.

12. Remember co-ops? Back in the 1970s, when health food stores were less common and before chains such as Whole Foods existed, there were many food co-ops. People got together, bought foods in bulk, and distributed the food, at cost, to the members of the co-op. I would love to see a resurgence of co-ops. Meanwhile, remember that credit unions are co-ops and are an alternative to banks. The Farm Bureau is a non-profit co-op, and it sells insurance. Look around for co-ops and non-profits that you might be able to shift your business to.

13. Support regulation and fight the corporate agenda. Don’t believe the corporate propaganda about the evils of regulation. In the real world, as opposed to the imaginary free-market utopia imagined by idealogues, it’s obvious that, if unregulated, corporations rapidly move toward predation, monopoly, and, eventually, oligarchy — which is pretty much where we are already in the United States. Corporations will always do everything they can to privatize profits and socialize costs. They don’t want their profits and sky-high executive salaries messed with, but they love bailouts. In Ireland, corrupt, corporatized politicians actually shifted the entire cost of the Irish bank bailout to Irish taxpayers. In the U.S., at least we mostly lent the bailout money to the banks. In Ireland they actually gave it to the banks. Corporatists, emboldened and empowered by the 2010 election, are pushing a nasty agenda: Rolling back environmental regulations, weakening unions and pushing wages down, continuing the takeover of public assets, continuing to shift the tax burden away from corporations and the rich to working people, weakening and starving the public school system, and so on. They’re winning, even though the public don’t support these things.

14. Rethink your career plans. If you’re young, how you make your living for the next 20 or 30 years can make a huge difference. Can you start your own business? Might you be able to work for a non-profit? I learned that there were many benefits for working for a private corporation rather than a corporation owned by Wall Street. Private corporations often take better care of their employees, because they don’t have to play games every quarter to try to keep Wall Street happy. Where you make your money is as important as where you spend it. Granted, working people in today’s post-industrial economy don’t have a lot of choices. But if you do have choices, go for it.

15. Roll back the clock. I would never argue that corporations have not improved our lives. In some ways, they have. That, after all, is why corporations exist — to supply some human need, something that can be done only with the combined effort of lots of people and specialized knowledge (like building airplanes, for example). But the problems occur when we, without thinking, let things go too far. So spend some time thinking about how corporations have brought you benefits but how they’ve also caused you harm. Did you buy tobacco from them? I hope not. Are you overweight because you eat too much corporate food? Have you become so dependent on television that you no longer know how to entertain yourself or your children? Have you failed to learn basic human skills, skills that your parents and grandparents once had, because you’ve become too dependent on corporations? How can you, in your life, roll back the clock to the time before corporations were out of control?

I leave you with a famous quote by Robert A. Heinlein. It’s from Time Enough for Love:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Heinlein is considered to have been a libertarian. But it wasn’t just government that helped us lose all this knowledge and give up so many choices. It was corporations.

Gone to Chrome

I am constantly experimenting with Web browsers and better ways to prevent corporate snooping on the Web. This has led me — for now at least — to stop using Apple’s Safari browser and switch to Google’s Chrome browser.

For one, manual cookie management in Safari (or any browser) is just too tedious. To make matters worse, there apparently is a bug in the Safari browser that causes Safari to recreate cookies that have been deleted. At first I thought I was victim to an “Ever cookie,” but a bit of Googling indicates that this actually is a Safari bug that has been present for years, but Apple still hasn’t fixed it. I also suspect that Safari has memory leaks. What’s up with Apple? Are they neglecting development of the Safari browser for some reason? These bugs have been discussed in Apple user forums for years.

(Non-techies may be wondering, “What’s a memory leak?” A memory leak is a programming error in which a program requests an allocation of memory but fails to free that memory when the program is done with it. As a result, as the program continues to run, it starts to use more and more memory. To recover the “leaked” memory, the program must be stopped and started again. I periodically use “Activity Monitor” on my Mac to see how much memory, CPU time, and virtual memory a program is using. It is stunning that Apple’s own Safari is one of the worst offenders I’ve seen, though it’s possible that some of the problem is coming from Safari plug-ins rather than from Safari itself.)

Google Chrome, on the other hand, may have the richest set of available security plug-ins. The screen capture above shows the security plug-ins that I’m using at present with Chrome. Rather than having to find and delete tracking cookies, for example, two of these extensions (Ghostery and ChromeBlock) detect and deflect the action of tracking cookies on the fly. When you go to a Web page, both Ghostery and ChromeBlock will show you how many corporations are trying to use that page to track you — very interesting, and very scary. Also, by default, I disallow Adobe’s evil Flash with FlashBlock.

I continue to use Firefox, with the Tor extension, when I want super-secure (but slower) browsing.

The New Yorker on Internet security

Anyone interested in Internet security and Internet snooping will want to read Seymour Hersh’s article in the Nov. 1 New Yorker: “The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war?” The article contains a lot of interesting background on where the government, the military, and private corporations stand on the question of Internet security in general. For example, it would be technically easy for all of us to have encrypted email, with each email electronically signed to verify who sent it — thus putting an end to spam and preventing anyone from snooping on our email. But the powers that be don’t want that, because they want to be able to snoop on us.

The article provoked me to do something that I had meant to do for a long time: set up my computer for encrypting email. It took me less than 30 minutes to do it. But the problem is, very few people are set up to encrypt email, so I’d be sending email that none of my email correspondents can read. What we chiefly need is a movement in which everyone starts encrypting their email. There are free tools for doing this, whether you’re using Windows, a Mac, or Linux. If you’re interested, why not Google around for some instructions…

On my Mac, I’m using MacGPG and GPGMail. Those of you using Windows might want to look into something like EnigMail. The concepts of public-key encryption can be daunting if you’re new to the idea. Some reading and experimentation are required. If programmers could make these interfaces truly simple (and they’re not there yet), then lots of people would start encrypting.