So, You Want to Hide from the NSA? Your Guide to the Nearly Impossible
Complaining about the government is a key part of being American, the first amendment to the Constitution. But it seems like a bit of a trickier proposition these days, with the government listening to everything you say online. In the interest of preserving your freedoms and bolstering our fair nation, here is the full articulation of the deeply paranoid and complex life you must live in order to assure that the government leaves you alone.
Before we begin, we'll note that technically the NSA isn't allowed to look at the stuff you do online. Thanks to the Patriot Act, it can (and does) store the metadata on phone calls Americans make every dayโwho was called, how long the call lasted, maybe some location data. The NSA also pulls in online content, but can't do so legally on targets in the United States. This is part of the PRISM program you may have heard about, in which the NSA can access data from an array of companies in near-real-time. In practice, the NSA's procedures are sufficiently lax that it does collect information (content) from Americans, of course. And until 2011, it collected metadata on emails, including subject lines and to- and from-addresses.
That is the worst case scenario. Yes, the NSA is definitely slurping up scads of information about your phone calls. It probably isn't storing your Facebook chats, emails, and Skype calls. Our goal with this guide is to detail exactly what you need to do to assure that it can't, even if it wants to. As you will see, it is a cumbersome process.
For assistance in fleshing out this guide, we spoke with Micah Lee, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has also written a guide to some of the tools mentioned below.
First, the really bad news.
The world learned about PRISM thanks to a series of slides leaked by Edward Snowden. Among those slides was this one.
On this slide, you can see the companies that participate in the program but also the data they offer the NSA, if the agency asks. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo (complete with trademark exclamation point), Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. All of the logos smushed into the header of the slide. And all of the companies to be avoided if you don't want any chance that the NSA can surveil what you're doing.
Again: We are not saying that you should not use Facebook. What we are saying is that if you are desperate to prevent the NSA from knowing what you're doing, you shouldn't use Facebook. And there's nothing you can do to make using Facebook betterโno encryption, no anything can make Facebook safe from the NSA. (We'll discuss this more a little later on.)
But it gets worse. These are the companies known to be participating in PRISM as of last October (when Apple was added). Since then, others may have been added; others may be added in the future. The truly paranoid, then, will have second thoughts about nearly any major Internet company.
And then it gets worse still, as Lee pointed out. "Any company that's inside of U.S. jurisdiction," he said, "can get government requests for data. Even if they're not listed in the PRISM slides, that doesn't mean the government isn't getting data from them." If the NSA wants your data, in other words, it can probably get it. It just might not be in real-time. (We'll get back to this, too.)
Before we continue, we should flesh out an important distinction. When you think of an email, what you generally think of is the content of the email, the message. In order for that message to get to you, though, the email also needs to contain metadata, a term loosely-and-not-entirely-accurately used to refer to information about the email message itself. For example: who it is addressed to, who it came from, what its subject is. (We have gone deeper into this before.)
Comtinue... for rest of article...worth the read.
