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Snowden's Tough Advice For Guarding Privacy
While urging policy reform as more important than per-person safeguards, Edward Snowden had a few pieces of advice on maintaining online privacy for attendees at Saturday's New Yorker Festival. As reported by TechCrunch, Snowden's ideas for avoiding online intrusions (delivered via video link) sound simple enough, but may not be easy for anyone who relies on Google, Facebook, or Dropbox, since those are three companies he names as ones to drop. A small slice: He also suggested that while Facebook and Google have improved their security, they remain “dangerous services” that people should avoid. (Somewhat amusingly, anyone watching the interview via Google Hangout or YouTube saw a Google logo above Snowden’s face as he said this.) His final piece of advice on this front: Don’t send unencrypted text messages, but instead use services like RedPhone and Silent Circle. Earlier in the interview, Snowden dismissed claims that increased encryption on iOS will hurt crime-fighting efforts. Even with that encryption, he said law enforcement officials can still ask for warrants that will give them complete access to a suspect’s phone, which will include the key to the encrypted data. Plus, companies like Apple, AT&T, and Verizon can be subpoenaed for their data.
gpg, when you can.
To encrypt, but have the encrypted output be encoded as text (so can be put copy/paste into an email)
gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES256 --armor example.txt
(gpg will then ask for a passphrase, make it long, as random as possible, upper and lower case, a punctuation, and a number)
TO DECRYPT
gpg example.txt.gpg
Steve Gibson has a very cool Internet resource for helping people learn about password strength: https://www.grc.com/haystack.h...
Per the haystack page:
Example passphrase = search space size
64characters of hex = 4.13 x 10^99
63characters of hex, plus adding a punctuation symbol = 4.93 x 10^117
62characters of hex, plus adding a punctuation symbol, plus adding an upper case letter = 3.79 x 10^126
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.