Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader tipped us to news that several Bitcoin exchanges have joined Mt Gox in suspending withdrawals after being forced out of sync with the Bitcoin network at large. After Mt Gox blamed transaction malleability for forcing them to suspend withdrawals, miscreants started flooding at least Bitpay and Btc-e with bogus transactions. Quoting the Bitcoin Foundation: "Somebody (or several somebodies) is taking advantage of the transaction malleability issue and relaying mutated versions of transactions. This is exposing bugs in both the reference implementation and some exchange’s software. We (core dev team, developers at the exchanges, and even big mining pools) are creating workarounds and fixes right now. This is a denial-of-service attack; whoever is doing this is not stealing coins, but is succeeding in preventing some transactions from confirming. It’s important to note that DoS attacks do not affect people’s bitcoin wallets or funds. "

Nerval's Lobster writes "The winter weather made my hands numb. I was distracted, rushed, running late to a meeting. Put those two things together, and it's a recipe for disaster,' Boonsri Dickinson writes in her account of how she lost her Google Glass unit. 'The cab had already gone two blocks before I realized my Google Glass was no longer in my hand. I asked the driver to swing back around to where he picked me up; I retraced my steps along the snowy street to my apartment, looking for my $1,500 device. No luck. Total panic.' The device featured photos, video, email, and other data that, in the wrong hands, could seriously upend her life. Fortunately, the person who found the Glass unit was a.) more interested in returning the device than wrecking her existence, and b.) engaged in quite a bit of digital detective work to track her down (with some help from Google). 'The device holds more than enough data to make me nervous about the possible voyeuristic invasion of my privacy, and the fear of the thought that the media connected to my Glass would possibly end up online, somewhere, cached forever in a Google search,' she concluded. But the saga also reset some of her faith in humanity."

An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."

At CES and other big trade shows, small companies and start-ups are often overshadowed by industry giants whose huge promotional budgets let them dominate a show's exhibit area. In this video, Tim Lord asked the spokespeople for five small companies exhibiting at CES whose products interested him to give one-minute presentations about their products. So take a quick look at the ZeroHour USB "tactical grade" battery backup flashlight; MadeSolid, a 3-D printing material company; TangoPC, "the world’s most powerful Pocketable, Officeable, Entertainmentable, Gameable, Windowsable, Linuxable PC; Google Glass competitor GlassUp; and DoorBot, "the doorbell for smartphones," which was featured on the ABC TV show Shark Tank in November, 2013. DoorBot got no investment from the "sharks," but managed to raise $1 million from "traditional technology investors." DoorBot's fundraising success aside, today's video is about companies that are unlikely to get much coverage from "mainstream" news channels that cover CES. If you don't see the video (probably because you're enjoying the thrill of Slashdot Beta), you can view it here.

An anonymous reader tips news that the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has approved a bill that would ban voice calls from mobile devices on airplanes. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), now goes to the full House of Representatives for a vote. Similar efforts are underway in the Senate. There was no opposition to Shuster's bill in the House committee, and the FCC received a flood of support for such a measure when they asked for public comment. In an op-ed published Monday, Shuster wrote, "In today’s world, enriched as it is by technology, we are bombarded by data, opinions, and potential distractions. Few limits to this flow of information are necessary, partly because people can typically turn it off, disconnect from it, or go elsewhere if they choose. But in the close confines of an airplane cabin – where passengers will still be able to use their mobile devices for texting, emailing, working, and more – there is no chance to opt out. So for those few hours of flight spent with 150 strangers, we can all wait to make that phone call. It’s just common sense and common courtesy."

An anonymous reader tips news that the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has approved a bill that would ban voice calls from mobile devices on airplanes. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), now goes to the full House of Representatives for a vote. Similar efforts are underway in the Senate. There was no opposition to Shuster's bill in the House committee, and the FCC received a flood of support for such a measure when they asked for public comment. In an op-ed published Monday, Shuster wrote, "In today’s world, enriched as it is by technology, we are bombarded by data, opinions, and potential distractions. Few limits to this flow of information are necessary, partly because people can typically turn it off, disconnect from it, or go elsewhere if they choose. But in the close confines of an airplane cabin – where passengers will still be able to use their mobile devices for texting, emailing, working, and more – there is no chance to opt out. So for those few hours of flight spent with 150 strangers, we can all wait to make that phone call. It’s just common sense and common courtesy."

An anonymous reader writes "Corporate employees editing Wikipedia articles about themselves or their employers sometimes commit major violations of Wikipedia's "bright line" against paid editing, devised by Jimbo Wales himself, to prevent 'COI' editing. (Consider the recent flap over the firm Wiki-PR's activities, for example.) Yet the Wikipediocracy website, run by critics of Wikipedia management, has just published an article about IBM employees editing Wikipedia articles. Not only is such editing apparently commonplace, it's being badly done as well. And most bizarrely, one of the IBM employees is a Wikipedia administrator, who is married to another Wikipedia administrator. She works on the Watson project, which uses online databases to build its AI system....including the full text of Wikipedia." Reading about edit wars is also far more informative (if less entertaining) than reading the edit wars themselves.

Nerval's Lobster writes "President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign relied on a sophisticated data-analytics platform that allowed organizers and volunteers to precisely target potential donors and voters. The centerpiece of that effort was Project Narwhal, which brought voter information—steadily accumulated since Obama's 2008 campaign—onto a single platform accessible to a growing number of campaign-related apps. The GOP has only a few short years to prepare for the next Presidential election cycle, and the party is scrambling to build an analytics system capable of competing against whatever the Democrats deploy onto the field of battle. To that end, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched Para Bellum Labs, modeled after a startup, to produce digital platforms for election analytics and voter engagement. Is this a genuine attempt to infuse the GOP's infrastructure with data science, or merely an attempt to show that the organization hasn't fallen behind the Democratic Party when it comes to analytics? Certainly the "Welcome to Para Bellum Labs" video posted by the RNC gives the impression of a huge office staffed with data scientists and programmers. However, the creation of a muscular digital ecosystem hinges on far more than building a couple of apps. Whatever the GOP rolls out, it'll face a tough opponent in the Democratic opposition, which will almost certainly emulate the robust IT infrastructure that the Obama campaign instituted in 2012 (not to mention Obama's massive voter and donor datasets). From that perspective, Para Bellum Labs might face the toughest job in politics."

Nerval's Lobster writes "President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign relied on a sophisticated data-analytics platform that allowed organizers and volunteers to precisely target potential donors and voters. The centerpiece of that effort was Project Narwhal, which brought voter information—steadily accumulated since Obama's 2008 campaign—onto a single platform accessible to a growing number of campaign-related apps. The GOP has only a few short years to prepare for the next Presidential election cycle, and the party is scrambling to build an analytics system capable of competing against whatever the Democrats deploy onto the field of battle. To that end, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched Para Bellum Labs, modeled after a startup, to produce digital platforms for election analytics and voter engagement. Is this a genuine attempt to infuse the GOP's infrastructure with data science, or merely an attempt to show that the organization hasn't fallen behind the Democratic Party when it comes to analytics? Certainly the "Welcome to Para Bellum Labs" video posted by the RNC gives the impression of a huge office staffed with data scientists and programmers. However, the creation of a muscular digital ecosystem hinges on far more than building a couple of apps. Whatever the GOP rolls out, it'll face a tough opponent in the Democratic opposition, which will almost certainly emulate the robust IT infrastructure that the Obama campaign instituted in 2012 (not to mention Obama's massive voter and donor datasets). From that perspective, Para Bellum Labs might face the toughest job in politics."

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

Nerval's Lobster writes "As Web applications grow in number and capability, storing large amounts of images can quickly become a problem. If you're a Web developer and need to store your client images, do you just keep them on the same server hosting your Website? What if you have several gigabytes worth of images that need to be processed in some way? Today, many developers are looking for an easy but cost-effective solution whereby images can be stored in the cloud and even processed automatically, thus taking a huge load off one's own servers, freeing up resources to focus on building applications. With that in mind, developer and editor Jeff Cogswell looks at a couple different cloud-based services for image storage and processing. At first glance, these services seem similar—but they're actually very different. He examines Cloudinary and Blitline, and encourages developers to take a look at ImageResizer, an open-source package that does a lot of what proprietary services do (you just need to install the software on your own servers). 'If you're not a programmer but a web designer or blogger, Blitline won't be of much use for you,' he writes. 'If you are a developer, both Cloudinary and Blitline work well.' What do you think?"

itwbennett writes "In a review of NSA surveillance last month, President Obama called for a new approach on telephony metadata that will 'establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.' Obama said that a third party holding all the data in a single, consolidated database would be essentially doing what is a government function, and may not increase public confidence that its privacy is being protected. Now, an RFI (request for information) has been posted to get information on U.S. industry's commercially available capabilities, so that the government can investigate alternative approaches."

DavidGilbert99 writes "James Dyson only releases products he is 100% happy with, which is why, despite nearly a decade of research in the area, his company has yet to release a robotic vacuum cleaner. To help drive research forward, he will invest £5 million in a joint research lab at Imperial College London which will focus on 'vision systems,' which Dyson hopes will help create the next generation of 'intelligent domestic robots.'" Last week Dyson proposed that the UK government offer monetary incentives to students with an interest and aptitude in science.

An anonymous reader writes "Wine on Android is happening slowly but surely ... Wine is now in a state to be able to run your favorite Windows (x86) game on your Android-powered ARM device, assuming the game is Windows Solitaire. Wine has been making progress on Android to allow simple applications to run on Wine, but they have run into some challenges, as noted in the annual talk at FOSDEM."

angry tapir writes "LinkedIn is shutting down Intro, its recently launched mobile service for connecting people over email, that raised security concerns. Intro was launched last October and described at the time as a 'dream come true for hackers' The service was made for the iPhone, and was designed to grab LinkedIn profile information and insert it into emails received on phones. The service displayed that information to the recipient from the email's sender if the sender was also on LinkedIn."

AthanasiusKircher writes "Environmental and health concerns about atrazine — one of the most commonly used herbicides in the U.S. — have been voiced for years, leading to an EU ban and multiple investigations by the EPA. Tyrone Hayes, a Berkeley professor who has spearheaded research on the topic, began to display signs of apparent paranoia over a decade ago. He noticed strangers following him to conferences around the world, taking notes and asking questions aimed to make him look foolish. He worried that someone was reading his email, and attacks against his reputation seemed to be everywhere; search engines even displayed ad hits like 'Tyrone Hayes Not Credible' when his name was searched for. But he wasn't paranoid: documents released after a lawsuit from Midwestern towns against Syngenta, the manufacturer of atrazine, showed a coordinated smear campaign. Syngenta's public relations team had a list of ways to defend its product, topped by 'discredit Hayes.' Its internal list of methods: 'have his work audited by 3rd party,' 'ask journals to retract,' 'set trap to entice him to sue,' 'investigate funding,' 'investigate wife,' etc. A recent New Yorker article chronicles this war against Hayes, but also his decision to go on the offensive and strike back. He took on the role of activist against atrazine, giving over 50 public talks on the subject each year, and even taunting Syngenta with profanity-laced emails, often delivered in a rapping 'gangsta' style. The story brings up important questions for science and its public persona: How do scientists fight a PR war against corporations with unlimited pockets? How far should they go?"

Nemo the Magnificent writes "A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm."

theodp writes "You wouldn't select Linus Torvalds to be the public face for the 'Year of Basketball.' So, why tap someone who doesn't code to be the face of 'The Year of Code'? Slate's Lily Hay Newman reports on the UK's Year of Code initiative to promote interest in programming and train teachers, which launched last week with a Director who freely admits that she doesn't know how to code. "I'm going to put my cards on the table," Lottie Dexter told Newsnight host Jeremy Paxman on national TV. I've committed this year to learning to code...so over this year I'm going to see exactly what I can achieve. So who knows, I might be the next Zuckerberg." "You can always dream," quipped the curmudgeonly Paxman, who was also unimpressed with Dexter's argument that the national initiative could teach people to make virtual birthday cards, an example straight out of Mark Zuckerberg's Hour of Code playbook (coming soon to the UK). Back in the States, YouTube chief and Hour of Code headliner Susan Wojcicki — one of many non-coder Code.org spokespersons — can be seen on YouTube fumbling for words to answer a little girl's straightforward question, "What is one way you apply Computer Science to your job at Google?". While it's understandable that companies and tech leaders probably couldn't make CS education "an issue like climate change" (for better or worse) without embracing politicians and celebrities, it'd be nice if they'd at least showcase a few more real-life coders in their campaigns."

fsterman writes "What do you get when you cross physical one-way-functions, a distributed and secure datastore, with physical Bitcoins? A viable alternative currency for micro-nations and dictatorships with hyper-inflation." Whatever your thoughts on bitcoin, it's interesting to think about the infrastructure and production cost of the tokens we use as money more generally.

An anonymous reader writes "When we last checked in with Tim Armstrong, the AOL CEO was demonstrating 'Leadership with a Capital L' to employees of the company's Patch local news subsidiary by summarily firing an employee in the middle of a conference call for taking photos. Armstrong continued to serve up tasty material for tech bloggers this past week, blaming $7.1 million in extra expenses from Obamacare, and for $2 million in expenses for 'two AOLers that had distressed babies', for a decision to hold all matching funds for employee 401K programs until the end of each calendar year. After a small firestorm in the press, and a petition from AOL employees unhappy with both the policy change and the way it was presented, Armstrong reversed course, reinstating the per-period match and apologizing for mentioning the individual employee cases (TechCrunch is an AOL subsidiary). Incidentally, Armstrong was originally following in the footsteps of IBM, which made similar changes to its 401K program that went into effect last year."

An anonymous reader writes "While RMS is opposed to LLVM over its BSD-like license rather than the GPL, LLVM/Clang and GCC developers have agreed to try to start cooperating in an "open compiler initiative" to jointly tackle common issues that plague both compilers and issues that can be better served by working together rather than creating fragmentation between the two popular open-source compilers."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Earlier this week, news reports leaked that the NYPD is evaluating whether to give its officers Google Glass for investigations and patrols. Google, which is sensitive to accusations that it works hand-in-hand with governments or law-enforcement agencies to monitor civilians, suggested that the NYPD must have purchased the units on its own initiative, rather than partner with the company. Some pundits and many civil libertarians hate the idea of law enforcement wearing Google Glass or other electronics that can send a constant stream of video and audio to a government (or even third-party) server. But at the same time, wearing Google Glass could also compel cops (and other law-enforcement personnel) to be on their best behavior at all times, particularly when it comes to use of force; the prospect of instantly available video detailing every aspect of an officer's shift could prove a powerful incentive to behave in a courteous and professional manner. But that's a very broad assumption; the reality—if cops really do start wearing Google Glass and other video-equipped electronics in large numbers—will likely end up determined by lots and lots of lawsuits and court-actions, many of them stemming from real-world incidents. Do you think cops should have Google Glass and other wearable electronics? And if so, what sort of regulations could be put in place to ensure that such technology isn't abused by the powers that be?"

theodp writes "Among the billionaires who helped Bill Gates pave the way for charter schools in WA was Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The Walton Family Foundation spent a whopping $158+ million in 2012 on what it calls 'systemic K-12 education reform,' which included $60,920,186 to 'shape public policy' and $652,209 on 'research and evaluation.' Confirming the LA Times' speculation about its influence, the Walton Foundation issued a press release Wednesday boasting it's the largest private funder of charter school 'startups,' adding that it has supported the opening of 1 in 4 charter schools in the U.S. since 1997 through its 1,500 'investments.' But as some charter school kids have learned the hard way, what the rich man giveth, he can also taketh away. For the time being, though, it looks like America's going to continue to depend on the tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers to educate its kids. For example, while it was nice to see the value of Shop Class recognized, the White House on Monday called on businesses, foundations and philanthropists to fund proposed 'Maker Spaces' in schools and libraries. Hey, when the U.S. Secretary of Education turns to corporate sponsors and auctions to fund his Mother's afterschool program for kids of low-income families in the President's hometown, don't look for things to change anytime soon."

theodp writes "Among the billionaires who helped Bill Gates pave the way for charter schools in WA was Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The Walton Family Foundation spent a whopping $158+ million in 2012 on what it calls 'systemic K-12 education reform,' which included $60,920,186 to 'shape public policy' and $652,209 on 'research and evaluation.' Confirming the LA Times' speculation about its influence, the Walton Foundation issued a press release Wednesday boasting it's the largest private funder of charter school 'startups,' adding that it has supported the opening of 1 in 4 charter schools in the U.S. since 1997 through its 1,500 'investments.' But as some charter school kids have learned the hard way, what the rich man giveth, he can also taketh away. For the time being, though, it looks like America's going to continue to depend on the tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers to educate its kids. For example, while it was nice to see the value of Shop Class recognized, the White House on Monday called on businesses, foundations and philanthropists to fund proposed 'Maker Spaces' in schools and libraries. Hey, when the U.S. Secretary of Education turns to corporate sponsors and auctions to fund his Mother's afterschool program for kids of low-income families in the President's hometown, don't look for things to change anytime soon."

theodp writes "Among the billionaires who helped Bill Gates pave the way for charter schools in WA was Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The Walton Family Foundation spent a whopping $158+ million in 2012 on what it calls 'systemic K-12 education reform,' which included $60,920,186 to 'shape public policy' and $652,209 on 'research and evaluation.' Confirming the LA Times' speculation about its influence, the Walton Foundation issued a press release Wednesday boasting it's the largest private funder of charter school 'startups,' adding that it has supported the opening of 1 in 4 charter schools in the U.S. since 1997 through its 1,500 'investments.' But as some charter school kids have learned the hard way, what the rich man giveth, he can also taketh away. For the time being, though, it looks like America's going to continue to depend on the tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers to educate its kids. For example, while it was nice to see the value of Shop Class recognized, the White House on Monday called on businesses, foundations and philanthropists to fund proposed 'Maker Spaces' in schools and libraries. Hey, when the U.S. Secretary of Education turns to corporate sponsors and auctions to fund his Mother's afterschool program for kids of low-income families in the President's hometown, don't look for things to change anytime soon."

linjaaho writes "Yesterday, the admin list of Finnish language Wikipedia received a request for comment from the National Police Board of Finland. The Police Board claims that the fundraising message appearing on the top of the Wikipedia pages is illegal fundraising and is punishable by criminal law. The Police Board asks how much money have they raised and ask for justification for the campaign. This is not the first time the Police Board has attacked fundraising; in 2012, a crowdfunded textbook Kickstarter project was delayed by a similar request for comment."

An anonymous reader writes "Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), are leaning on the United States government to discourage India from allowing the production and sale of affordable generic drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. India is currently on the U.S. government's Priority Watch List — countries whose practices on protecting intellectual property Washington believes should be monitored closely. Last year Novartis lost a six-year legal battle after the Indian Supreme court ruled that small changes and improvements to the drug Glivec did not amount to innovation deserving of a patent. Western drugmakers Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche Holding, Sanofi, and others have a bigger share of the fast-growing drug market in India. But they have been frustrated by a series of decisions on patents and pricing, as part of New Delhi's push to increase access to life-saving treatments in a place where only 15 percent of 1.2 billion people are covered by health insurance. One would certainly understand and probably agree with the need for for cheaper drugs. But don't forget that big pharma, for all its problems still is the number one creator of new drugs. In 2012 alone, the U.S. government and private companies spent a combined $130 billion (PDF) on medical research."

Eton Corp. makes well-reviewed emergency radios and hand-cranked generators for emergency use. Timothy Lord talked with them at CES and made this video of how the devices work. Alternate video link @ tv.Slashdot.org.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Renault's new concept car gives drivers an unusual companion: a small flying drone, controllable via tablet or preset GPS waypoints, which scans the area ahead for obstacles and traffic. The so-called 'flying companion' can exit the vehicle via a retractable hatch in the roof, and buzz around the immediate vicinity shooting video and photos; as this is a concept, actual hardware and software specs aren't available, although Renault's engineers envision something closer to the size of a small bird than some of the larger drones currently available. But how practical is a 'driving drone'? Considering all the accidents caused by people texting or Web-surfing while driving, it seems questionable to introduce a piece of hardware that could prove even more distracting—imagine trying to successfully guide a drone with touch-screen controls while navigating a fast-paced roadway, and you can see why the idea of a "flying companion" would raise the collective blood pressure of traffic-safety officials. Yes, it would be safer for a passenger to handle drone-flying duties while the driver concentrates on the road; but it's also a near-certainty, if such a concept ever went into production, that more than one driver would attempt to multi-task the navigation of two vehicles at once. Do you think this idea is feasible?"

jfruh writes "Having already gotten out of the low-end server market, IBM appears to be trying to get out of the chip business as well. The company currently manufactures Power Architecture chips for its own use and for other customers. Big Blue wants to sell off its manufacturing operations, but will continue to design its own chips."

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a video report posted Feb. 4, NBC News reporter Richard Engel, with the help of a security analyst, two fresh laptops, a new cell phone, and a fake identity, pretended to go online with the technical naiveté of a Neanderthal housepet. (Engel's video blog is here.) Almost as soon as he turned on the phone in the Sochi airport, Engel reported hackers snooping around, testing the security of the machines. Engel's story didn't explain whether 'snooping around' meant someone was port-scanning his device in particular with the intention of cracking its security and prying out its secrets, no matter how much effort it took, or if the 'snooping' was other WiFi devices looking for access points and trying automatically to connect with those that were unprotected. Judging from the rest of his story, it was more likely the latter. Engel also reported hackers snooping around a honeypot set up by his security consultant which, as Gartner analyst Paul Proctor also pointed out in a blog posting, is like leaving the honey open and complaining when it attracts flies. When you try to communicate with anything, it also tries to communicate with you; that's how networked computers work: They communicate with each other. None of the 'hacks' or intrusions Engel created or sought out for himself have anything to do with Russia or Sochi, however; those 'hacks' he experienced could have happened in any Starbucks in the country, and does almost every day, Proctor wrote. That's why there is antivirus software for phones and laptops. It's why every expert, document, video, audio clip or even game that has anything at all to do with cybersecurity makes sure to mention you should never open attachments from spam email, or in email from people you don't know, and you should set up your browser to keep random web sites from downloading and installing anything they want on your computer. But keep up the fear-mongering."

We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look. So let's all slow down. Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design, to have you show us what pieces need to be fixed, and how. If you want to move back to Classic Slashdot, that path is available: from the Slashdot Beta page, you just need to select the "Slashdot Classic" link from the footer (or this link). We're committed to keep you informed of the plans as changes are implemented; we can't promise that every user will like every change, but we don't want anything to come as a surprise. Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process. Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time. We're keeping you informed of this process, because we're a community and we want to take everyone with us. But, yes, we're trying something new. Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories. It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that. And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive. Please keep it coming. We will be adding more specific info here in the days to come.

We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look. So let's all slow down. Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design, to have you show us what pieces need to be fixed, and how. If you want to move back to Classic Slashdot, that path is available: from the Slashdot Beta page, you just need to select the "Slashdot Classic" link from the footer (or this link). We're committed to keep you informed of the plans as changes are implemented; we can't promise that every user will like every change, but we don't want anything to come as a surprise. Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process. Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time. We're keeping you informed of this process, because we're a community and we want to take everyone with us. But, yes, we're trying something new. Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories. It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that. And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive. Please keep it coming. We will be adding more specific info here in the days to come.