Thursday, April 3, 2014

NSA: Please Turn the Lights off When You Leave. Nothing to See Here.

by Dietrich Schmitz


It's all out in the open now. The NSA can 'cherry pick' your private and personal Internet meta data whenever they wish. Right?

Wrong. They cannot.

That is, of course, provided you, the general public, place obstacles in their way which will impede, or, better yet, stop them entirely from peering into your private affairs.

Yes, that's right. You have tools at your disposal which will most assuredly put the kibosh on the NSA. Stop them cold in their tracks. They'll come, discover they can't see anything, and leave.

What is it that will stop them from seeing your private data?:

Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) or, just GPG for short.


Free and Gnu Public Licensed GnuPG is a form of strong encryption which has been deemed by experts, including whistle blower Edward Snowden, as effective in keeping your data from being snooped upon.

I recommend to Linux users free Gnu Public Licensed Evolution email for both personal and business needs. (Image left, Edward Snowden, credit: Flickr user DonkeyHotey)






Evolution email running on my Fedora 20 LXDE Desktop


Evolution is feature-complete, mature (that means stable), and supports GnuPG (OpenPGP) encryption formatted email.

Use it once or twice and I am confident you'll get the hang of it.  It will even use your existing Gmail or other email account with secure TLS POP3/IMAP connectivity.

And, for those eager to install Evolution, here is a good tutorial to get you up to speed quickly.

Need to wrap your mind around GPG? Read more about it here.


Just to give you a visual of what an Evolution created gpg-encrypted gmail looks like 'after the fact' from Gmail's web view -- there's truly nothing to see -- this is what the Google staff and NSA would find:

Evolution GPG-protected email stored on Gmail.  Nothing to see.


And, as always, if you have questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact me.

So, NSA? Please turn off the lights when you leave. Nothing to see here.  Thanks!

-- Dietrich

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