I wanted to start a thread in regards to taking back some of your privacy. I firmly believe that it's in everyone's best interest to be in control of their own communication and with whom they wish to communicate with. If you don't do anything wrong with the technology (IE: Criminal activities), then there is no reason for someone to be spying on you. In stating as much, I would suggest setting up your own VoIP (Voice Over IP). You can subscribe a paid service (IE: Vonage) or you can do your own. It's merely your preference on how you would like to go about doing it. My personal choice is to go with your own VoIP. Setup is relatively simple, and start up could range from $50 - $100+, depending on the equipment you already own. Here are two great links to get you started in the right direction: http://www.howtogeek.com/136959/how-to-switch-to-voip-and-ditch-your-home-phone-bill-forever/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2MK6cTo-I In a nutshell, you can convert your existing home phone line to a cell phone line. From there, convert it over to Google Voice ($20). This will require a cell phone, AT&T is known to be able to do this, even if you don't have the service, buy a cheap Go Phone, load it up with $5 - $10 worth of minutes, run with it. Buy the OBi100 device (Or better), and follow along with the instructions in the 'How To Geek' instructions on that. If you want E911, it'll cost $12 a year for it. Thus, after your one time fee, you're looking at $12 a year, cheaper than even Magic Jack. If you don't care for E911, it's only the one time fee. Benefit of this? Exclude even the cost factor, all of your calls will now be encrypted and sent as packets. Meaning, it will be harder for the NSA to tap into those calls. The FBI is looking to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that will allow them to tap into your VoIP communication. As of right now, they're not able to. BUT, this is only for the major VoIP providers. With setting up your own, they won't have an easy gateway to it either. Another benefit over going with paid services, such as Vonage. One last point, if you have family or friends that live around the world, by everyone utilizing the OBi devices, all phone calls are free between them. Meaning just that, you won't pay a penny for any communication between those devices. All of that information is freely located on their sites and the other outlets selling the devices. Follow up post to ensue...
Now the next big thing is that they are able to monitor the internet. How do we get around this? Well, it's not as easy as one might think. However, there are two potential ways of circumventing this issue. One is utilizing the Tor network, the other is getting involved with the MeshNet service. Both involving varying things, let's tackle the Tor network first. The Tor network is setup is order to route communication to various networks that individuals, like you and myself, that setup gateways to allow this communication. Essentially, the Tor network comprises itself of many routers that you ping to finally reach your destination point. The benefit to this is it makes it harder for anyone to identify where you're going. How so? This is because you're essentially relaying the information from one network to the other until you eventually reach your destination. Where as how you use the internet now, it's one-to-one type of communication. We're talking one-to-many. Obviously, this comes at a cost, as it will cause some slow down to how fast the information is retrieved. This is because it depends upon the amount of hops your connection makes and how fast the overall internet connection is. If privacy is more important than speed, this is the least of your worries. You can utilize the Tor network in one of many ways, but here are the top two favorites. You can download the Tor browser (https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en) or you can purchase the components to build an 'Onion PI' (http://learn.adafruit.com/onion-pi/overview). Varying benefits to both. With the Tor browser, it's absolutely free to use. You simply run the Tor service, pull up the Tor-configured Firefox browser, and do all of your internet browsing within there. It's highly recommended to setup your network to be included within the Tor network. The more networks involved, the better the quality will become. However, sometimes this can be a bit too involved for some folks and maybe it's one too many steps. Then you can purchase & build an Onion PI and made to act as a gateway/extender. Thus, any device you connect to the Onion PI will automatically utilize the Tor network. There are caveats to this (http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/18/onion-pi/), however, according to Edward Snowden, as long as it's encrypted, it's safe. Meaning, ensure all, or most of, your communication is through SSL (Port 443). That makes it harder for the NSA to tap into you as well. The last one that I've yet to discuss is the (https://projectmeshnet.org/). This project is still in beta, right now. However, the efforts look promising. How this works is by setting up every computers NIC (Network Interface Card) as a DNS (Domain Name Server). Thus, you will communicate directly to each computer, rather than going through a series of routers & switches. In order to protect this network, you have to be accept into their network, by someone who is already on the network. This keeps unwanted folks (IE: NSA) out of the communication channels. As you understand how this process works, the only way it can grow is by getting others, you know aren't involved with the illegal spying, and grow the network. The only downside to this is that the instructions provided are for Debian based OS installations. It can be followed to figure out how to install it onto other OS, however, there currently isn't much information out for it. Again, this is just a beta, but it is definitely a lot more advanced & a lot more securer than the Tor network. Some people might be deterred by this, I simply wanted to provide this information, just in case someone didn't trust the Tor network and wanted an alternative. Plus, the MeshNet doesn't require an internet connection. I don't even think I need to get into all of the details on why that's such a marvelous thing. One last follow up post...
So we've covered phone & internet. What's the last piece of communication that NSA has been to tap into? If you've guessed e-mail, well pat yourself on the back for being well informed. E-mails are also being tapped into. With more and more of your communication being snooped upon, I think it's safe to say that with this constant over reach, it's time folks begin to fight back. In saying so, BitMessage (https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page) is that answer. If you're familiar with how BitCoin works, then this is going to be nothing new to you. If you're not familiar, let me gloss over a few key points. BitMessage works by established addresses that can be used to communicate to various entities. Unlike e-mail addresses, this type of communicate hides the sender & receiver information. This means that whomever is looking at the communication trial, they will have no idea to whom it's going to or from. Thus, the main reason why folks go towards BitCoin for donations as well, you remain anonymous. Same goes for the BitMessage application. The benefit to this as well is you can also utilize the Tor network. What does that imply? Put simply, not only will your communication be anonymous, but it will also bounce the communication around until it ends at it's end point. Thus further ensuring that your communication remains secure, your privacy continues to be protected, and ensure that it will take quite sometime before any government agency determines what type of communication is going on. Sorry for the magnitude of posts. I know this information will be a lot to digest. Hopefully some of it will be useful, if not all of it. Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns over any of this, as the more folks we get involved with these efforts, the sooner folks can begin to take their freedoms & liberties back. Also, if anyone has anything to add to this or maybe other suggestions, please add them to this. Together, we'll build this thread up so folks have many opportunities to get their privacy back.
To give this thread a bit more to it, waltky added a search engine that sends your information anonymously to Google. Thus keeping your internet search safe from being collected, further making your information private. That information can be found here. In short, the website for the search engine is http://www.startpage.com/.
One thing that I've been some research on is encrypted communication for the cellular devices. I haven't touched on that, allow me to provide a few here now. If free is the route most folks want to go, if you have an Android, RedPhone & TextSecure are the two apps for you, both can be found here: https://www.whispersystems.org. For iPhone, Wickr for SMS. The downside to these, the other device needs to have these applications installed in order to have the communications encrypted. So this route would require getting all of your friends to install this app and beginning to swap information amongst yourselves. This will begin to create your own networks, but if others are utilizing the app, you have a chance of it being encrypted. Now if you would rather go cross platform, Wabiz is available for free, with limitations, or $12 for each device with no limitations. This will encrypt your e-mails & SMS between Android & iPhone. For voice, there are several different routes, each getting varying in price. However, I will name most of the realistic ones, to give folks the cheaper route, but definitely not less effective. VoIP - This can be accomplished utilizing varying things, but probably the easiest route is to create a Google Voice account and install the Talkatone app. There are other alternatives to Google Voice, but this is the free route plus while utilizing Talkatone, it can encrypt your calls. This is all free, but Talkatone utilizes ads in order to provide it for free. If you pay for the premium service, which is $2 a month or $20 for the year. A very modest payment that ensures your security & privacy is protected. Silent Circle - https://silentcircle.com/web/personal/. It's $120 a year per device. It encrypts voice, text, e-mail, & camera. Meaning, all but your internet communication will be secure through this one app. The downside to this is you would need to have the other device utilizing the Silent Circle app to enjoy the benefits. However, for $408 a year per device, all of your voice, text, e-mail, & camera functions will be secure with anyone. Obviously this becomes a bit pricey, thus a bigger need to have more people secure their own device, but obviously that's not always an option. There are many other options for the varying things. However, these provide the best options for free or close to it (Outside of Silent Circle). If anyone has any experiences with these or can suggest alternatives and can provide a synopsis of them, please do so.
Another thing I've been researching is encrypting your entire device. I know some folks might have a Blackberry or Windows phone, the scope of my research was Android & iPhone. This is for multiple reasons (Biggest one being I have an Android phone and my wife has an iPhone), but the last quarter of 2012, iPhone users rose to 51.2% while Android users went to 44.8% (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57565106-37/iphone-wins-51-percent-of-u.s-smartphone-sales-says-report/). Effectively controlled 95% of the smartphone sector. Thus, it's a very likely chance that whomever reads this thread, they are one of the fore mentioned phones. If you have something else, get an Android or iPhone. I'll start with the easiest, the iPhone. There isn't a 100% way to fully encrypt the phone. Apple 'claims' to have it encrypted (IE: iMessage), but no one knows for sure because everything is locked down. However, you can ensure that the encryption functionality is working, as expected, by setting up a passcode to your phone. What this does is ensures that all of the encryption functionality is working and can't allow someone to easily access your information. I know this sounds very simple, but that's all you truly have in this department. However, Apple does a way to decrypt the information for the FBI (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57583843-38/apple-deluged-by-police-demands-to-decrypt-iphones/). Again, it all comes down to how much do you trust a company? If they have a way to break your encryption, how secure is it really? For Android, there are a couple different options. The first one can be done by utilizing the native encryption feature built into Android. These steps are valid from Ginger Bread on up to the latest (Key Lime Pie). How to perform this can be found here: http://www.howtogeek.com/141953/how-to-encrypt-your-android-phone-and-why-you-might-want-to/. However, there are alternatives. Two applications are available but I would only recommend utilizing one. That would be Droid Crypt. This app allows you to chose files & directories that you would like to encrypt. However, it does cost $2.56. Not a big deal, but definitely something to keep in mind. There are plenty of other options out there, however this should at least give folks a starting point. If more information is needed, this website can shed more light on various areas. Some of it covers what's been discussed here, while some of it not so much. All of this aims to better arm everyone with enough information to be able to make an informed decision on how to protect their privacy. That's the gist of these posts, inform everyone. If anyone has any experiences or has anything else to add, please feel free to include it within this thread. Hopefully this thread can grow to provide more information on how to protect folks private information.
Apple flaw makes iMessage vulnerable to hackers... Apple Flaw could Allow Hackers to Access Devices Via Messaging July 22, 2016 - Researchers have discovered a flaw in Apples operating systems that could allow a hacker to gain access to your Mac or iPhone by sending an iMessage. See also: Edward Snowden Develops Anti-Spy Phone Device July 22, 2016 - Whistleblower and former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden says he's working on a mobile phone case that would prevent users from being spied on. The ex-National Security Agency analyst hopes the case for the iPhone 6 will prevent the phone from transmitting certain data, particularly the location of the user.
