How to Protect Your Communications From the NSA

By Roberto Baldwin, Wired

08 June 13

our private conversations aren't that private. In fact, the government is tapped into the servers of the top technology companies.

The NSA was granted carte blanche to the metadata of millions of Verizon phone calls. Current laws allow cops to access your email without a warrant if that email is stored in the cloud at least six months. Someone, somewhere could potentially be listening or reading your conversations. You can fight it, but it's not easy.

If you're not concerned about the government, hackers are out there ready to dox (display all your personal information online) you if they deem you important enough or for the fun of it. So how do you communicate without the whole world finding out that you've visited the doctor 12 times in the past six months for a mysterious rash? Well it's not easy, but there are ways to keep your correspondence off the grid.

Phone

Clearly you can't use your own phone, given that the government already is compiling metadata on who you call and how often. To limit the chance of being spied upon while making calls on the go you need to invest in a "burner" phone (so named because such phones are used for a brief period of time, then tossed away like stale pizza). As anyone who watched The Wire knows, these cheap pay-as-you-go phones can be picked up at most electronic stores and some convenience stores. If you're extra parano... er, cautious, pay cash. Now you have a phone that's not linked in any way to your identity. if you're extra, extra parano... er, cautious, pay cash and never buy them from the same store twice.

Of course, the person you're calling also needs a burner phone. What's the point of using an anonymous phone if the person you're calling is still using their potentially tapped personal phone?

Email

A quickie burner account from Gmail or other online outfit isn't enough these days. By tracing the IP address of a sent email, law enforcement and anyone with a little bit of technical skill can determine where an email originated. It doesn't take NSA-level access to Google's servers to trace the origin of all those emails you sent to the UN and the White House about black helicopters and the New World Order.

To truly and effectively hide your identity, you need to use Tor. Tor was developed by the U.S. Navy to help protect government communications. The service creates a network of virtual tunnels that ISPs and other more nefarious organizations can't track. Just download the Tor browser and start emailing.

But not with Gmail. Use Hushmail's secure email service. It has fancy security features like OpenPGP to encrypt all those emails you're sending to your friends about the party at the lake this weekend.

And finally, don't open any documents, enable any Flash or Quicktime files, or enable or install any browser plugins while using Tor or web-based email. All of those could potentially reveal your location.

Of course, like your phone calls, this works best when your friends start using Tor and anonymous email accounts Hushmail. Just tell them it's like you're super spies. Or you're Robert Clayton Dean and Edward Brill.

IM

Google, AIM, Yahoo and Skype may do a good job securing your chats, but when the NSA comes to the door with a warrant, all your communications are available for scrutiny. Instead of letting big brother read all your LOLs, OMGs, and WTFs, you need to start using OTR (off the record) messaging. Such messages are encrypted so they can't actually be read if they're intercepted or pulled with a subpoena.

Just head on over to the OTR messaging site. If you use Pidgin for Windows, you can download a plugin. If you use anything else you can download the source code, library, and toolkit to get OTR working on your machine. Yeah, you might need a degree in computer science to get up and running, but if private IMs are important to you, you won't mind compiling some software to chat with friends.

Once that's all done, launch Tor and use that in conjunction with OTR. And of course, go to your friends' houses and do the same thing on their computer.

In Person

Sometime you have to meet people in real life. What if they're wearing a wire, or worse, you're being tracked by, oh I don't know, the FBI. One way to deter audio recording is to talk near a waterfall or other location bathed in white noise. (It totally worked for the terrorists on Homeland).

The fact of the matter is that total privacy isn't just tough, it's nearly impossible for the average person. The truly paranoid, and there are people that should be, have so many hoops to jump through just do something as easy as send an email or make a phone call. And even if you follow all recommended tips, the biggest breach is still the person on the other end. You could go through all the hassle of making sure your messages are private and they could just throw all those messages onto the Internet.