EFF Launches Surveillance Self-Defense Site

justin.foell writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created a Surveillance Self-Defense site. Created with the help of the Open Society Institute, the site intends to serve as a how-to guide for protecting your private data against government spying. From their press release, they 'aim to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government's hands.'"

Comments

Biggest problem: Defaults are mostly insecure

[muckracer]

I commend the EFF's good efforts and their attempts to protect 'We the people' from, well, other men in the middle. However, as valuable as the information is, it will have little to none tangible benefit. The users reading those pages in the first place are already the one's interested in such technologies, probably already use some of them and are generally not the target group. The big mass of people will never read these pages, nevermind implement the solutions laid out there. Thus they force even the privacy-conscious to remain unsecured in their communications with them, as both sides need certain setup's (encryption etc.).

So the real question is this: How do we not just get a nice write-up about what we *could* do, but how do we get these features activated by default?
For example, AFAIK none of the popular Linux distributions enables IM (OTR) encryption out-of-the-box. Why not?
Why have we still not come up with a way to enable opportunistic encryption for e-mail (think GPG in the background without user intervention), as well enabled by default?
etc.pp..

It is the experience of every geek, that most 'normal' people leave things fairly alone and just try to use them as they come. Since most OS' and program's defaults are insecure, it is, IMHO, one of the primary reasons that everything is so easily monitored, stored and...eventually used against you.
Here the Linux distributions could make a dramatic impact overall and I would welcome something like an official "privacy-year", where the distros focus less on cramming the latest .0.0.0.1beta version on the disks, but make a true effort to secure their shipped communication-related programs. If usability-issues exist, they should also be addressed. That, and only that, would make any kind of real-life difference: Make security and privacy the default!