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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.'"
Then the government will just request the access logs from this site to see who should they spy. :-)
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I Know You're Listening
Eclipse PDE and Me
On a more serious note, will any accesses to the site be logged by ISPs so they know who to watch?
EFF! That's who.
Nice site, has thorough and accessible explanations of things that the non-geek-yet-somewhat-paranoid digital populace really need to get clued up. The section on FISA, particularly the Beyond FISA page, is a must read. That Fourth Amendment sure was nice while it lasted....
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
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. .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!
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
gah, if you have nothing to hide then you shouldnt have any problem with the government seeing what your doing on the internet. The only people who want to hide what their doing are the ones who have something to hide
It's a fine site with lots of good information. But it skips some things that people interested in privacy should probably know about. I see no mention on the site of Freenet or the concept of darknets/opennets. The section on disk encryption doesn't mention hardware-based solutions at all, even though they are about the easiest for a non-geek user to implement.
Good start. Keep it up, EFF.
Hey, I thought all the spying on citizens would end once the Bush Administration and their minions of fascism were chucked out of office?
Did I miss a memo from the new bunch, or what?
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
why people talk about privacy in relation to anything that happens on the internet
i'm not talking about government policy, i'm talking philosophical reality
if you put something on a wire, beyond your control, its no longer private. beginning and ending of discussion
but since most of what gets put on the net is willingly understood by most people as not private, since it just is detritus of their lives, not vital life-altering information, this is not a big deal
if you want privacy, take an airplane, and take a walk on a beach with the other person so the crashing surf drowns out the conversation beyond 2 meters
anything else, especially on the internet, can be spied on, and not just by the government. if you bound the government to draconian privacy laws in 72 bold font written in the blood of a virgin, they would still spy if they thought it important enough, and we aren't even beginning to examine other culprits: IT personnel, hackers, cable/ phone infrastructure employees, competing business interests, random busybodies, etc
and guess what? this arrangement is perfectly fine for all non paranoid schizophrenics, since most of what is put on the internet can be easily compromised without compromising your life
that's the real issue with privacy on the internet: give it up when you hit click
once you put it on a wire, its beyond your control, and beyond the philosphical realm of privacy
why does the concept of privacy even figure in with that arrangement in some people's minds?
you are communicating, across the wires of a corporate interest, across international boundaries often, with governments keen to mine data, usually involving destinations who want to sell you advertising via profiling, which you found with a search engine which keeps tabs on you...
abnd you want to talk about even the possibility of privacy in this realm?
really?
why isn't it just understood that privacy is forfeit on the internet?
and this is FINE. if its really important to you, KEEP IT OFF THE NET. there: a surefire personal privacy policy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it