[UPDATE: IĀ“ve posted a 2nd article on the subject. ItĀ“s focussing on political activism and anonymity online.Ā
On another note I also skipped Skype for Jitsi,Ā an open source and encrypted alternative that just works and does not required any personal data at registration.]
Pretty scary headlines blink on everbody“s screens these days: Edward Snowden lifted the curtain to the international power games and their tools of mass surveillance online (and offline: in 2012 160 billion pieces of paper mail have been photographed in the US). Now that the conspiracy theories I used to laugh about became a reality, now that we reached a point that would make the "Stasi" (= shortcut for "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" what roughly translates to "National Security Agency") go green with envy, I see two ways of dealing with this:
"Be the friction": Shoshana Zuboff calls on us to break the arrogance of Silicon Valley:Ā This friction "...is our insistence on a new commercial model that refuses to externalize our well being, our freedom, our privacy, and our rights to live our lives and manage our data as we choose. It is a demand for companies to take responsibility and accept accountability to end users as the ultimate source of value and wealth. Finally, friction is you and me. It is our willingness to exercise judgement, to say what is right and what is wrong even when we are at odds with power and opinion."
I decided to go with the latter for the moment and these are my ingredients, you might want to pick yours:
VPN/ TOR
The most fundamental change for me was starting to use aĀ VPNĀ (Virtual Private Network) provider and its server network to access the webĀ and yes, this does not come for free. I knew roughly about VPNs before but had no idea about good quality services so I asked for some advice on Facebook. Oh the irony.
After some research to understand the tech and protocols behind I found "Perfect Privacy" to be the perfect service for me. Until I figured itĀ“s run by neo nazis, why I wonĀ“t link there too. Watch out! So my personal finalists I give a try areĀ BtGuardĀ (thanks toĀ @zeigorĀ ) andĀ VpnArea.Ā They come atĀ 7.95⬠and 9.99ā¬/ month, have a no-log policy (no logs at all, also no connection times), both are not US nor EU companies but based in Canada and Switzerland and offer the OpenVPN protocol instead of the industryĀ“s quasi standard PPTP by Microsoft.
I also started using Tor more regularly, a distributed, anonymous network of virtual tunnels and it“s version of Firefox. It“s easy by now and done in 2 minutes with out any coding. If you just want to make one thing to improve your privacy online make it Tor.
DIASPORA OVER FACEBOOK
I“ll give Diaspora another try as my primary social network and from there push links to Facebook. No more interaction there and almost all my info is deleted. Diaspora is a community powered ads free Facebook alternative that obviously becomes better with more friends joining in. It has quite some disadvantages for sure but I just have enough. Mark, I“m not your product. Sorry.
Twitter shows that it can work differently too: In a recent announcement they stated that if "'Do Not Track' is enabled in your browser (check your browser“s settings page), Twitter will not collect information in order to show targeted ads on Twitter" and it allows to completely opt out of targeted ads via the settings page.
SEARCH
I skipped Google Search forĀ DuckDuckGo. There are extensions and plugins for all your favorite browsers and it just works. No tracking, no logs.
EMAIL
The nasty part clearly is email: Encrypting emails is quite some hassleĀ becauseĀ you have to juggle with private and public keys. Although I probably will rarely use it I wanted toĀ understandĀ how it works and theĀ easiest way I came across to be used with Gmail isĀ MailvelopeĀ build on theĀ OpenPGPĀ encryption standard. With the Firefox Addon or its Chrome Extension it allows for powerful encryption right in the web frontend of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com and similar web mailer.Ā
BROWSER
On the browser side I use Chrome "hardened" by the following:Ā
HTTPS Everywhere:Ā It automatically switches thousands of sites from insecure "http" to secure "https".
Ghostery: Helps you to track and block the invisible trackers on websites.
Disconnect: Manage and disable tracking and depersonalize search.
MOBILE
My Android routes its Firefox traffic now through Tor too with "Orbot" and the mobile Twitter app connects via "proxy ("localhost", "8118"). If this sounds cryptic to you just have a look here: it“s easy and done in no time.
BLOGGING
I“m about to switch back from this Tumblr to a self hosted Wordpress blog. Although this means more work (backups, plugins) it“s open source and I own my data. Stay tuned on this one.
MISC
I also stopped "quantified self" services Ā“cause it increasingly felt like "spying on myself" and cleaned out services I joined because of my "1st mover index finger" but actually never could find a real benefit for me. I quit using foursquare, runtastic, instagram and path among others. For more background on this I found theĀ articleĀ by BigThinkĀ“s David Berreby pretty much aligned with my thinking: "Self-monitoring, it seems to me, fosters acceptance of extreme surveillance as a part of life."Ā
ORGANIZE
To me it makes more sense then ever to support organisations that directly take legal action and try to inform the public and preserve our civil rights therefore I joined theĀ "Electronic Frontier Foundation" (EFF). I also donated to the Guardian to say "Thank You" for being one of the rare sources really doing the job of critical journalism these days.
I know that all of the above is not "the solution", neither technically, because it won“t have much impact on the identification via "browser fingerprint" f.e. (If you don“t know what that is just go here and run the little anonymous test. It“s an eye opener.)
Nor politically. Because ultimately this is a political challenge. This is what we elect gouvernements for: To listen to the collective will of its people and serve it by representing it internationally and enacting laws to make infringements punishable. Theoretically.
Sad to say but practically I don“t see any German gouvernement to do this anytime soon because of two very simple reasons:
German secret services benefit from the data and are heavily involved in the surveillance themselves.
We simply don“t have leaders able (or even willing) to really pick up this fight internally and with the US.
No doubt it would be better to have secret services not out of any democratic control, but reality looks different today. Therefore I think we have the duty to do what we can to defend our freedom of expression in the virtual space if we donĀ“t want to loose the enormous potential this global web infrastructureĀ offersĀ to us. DonĀ“t wait for politics or legal entities, itĀ“s time for digital self-defense.Ā
All in all for me it comes down toĀ findingĀ a newĀ balanceĀ between security and usability and this is my try. LetĀ“s see how it will work out...Ā
On a final note: just imagine for a second how the next wave of Silicon Valley“s tech obsessions like Google's Glass will take surveillance to a whole new level: Then it will not only be the users "spying" on themselves but on each other although.
Automated "Glass-tracking paintball drones" anyone?
And if you think that #prism or #tempora are big you might want to read this to understand we are only aware of the tip of the iceberg:
In April, as part of its 2014 budget request, the Pentagon asked Congress for $4.7 billion for increased ācyberspace operations,ā nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation.Ā
The US Cyber Command. Keith Alexander, newly promoted to four-star general, was put in charge of it. The forces under his command were now truly formidableāhis untold thousands of NSA spies, as well as 14,000 incoming Cyber Command personnel, including Navy, Army, and Air Force troops.
Indeed,Ā dominanceĀ has long been their watchword. Alexanderās Navy calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. And Alexanderās Army warned, āIt is in cyberspace that we must use our strategic vision to dominate the information environment.ā The Army is reportedly treating digital weapons as another form of offensive capability, providing frontline troops with the option of requesting ācyber fire supportā from Cyber Command in the same way they request air and artillery support.
Photo: Unknown Photographer, Wikipedia