Every day, it seems, there's another story about the web of surveillance that's
being woven around us by governments and telecom firms and hackers. Between
the webcams and DVRs that can be activated remotely to watch us at our desks
or in front of our TVs, the warrantless wiretaps that vacuum up millions of
phone calls and emails and the data dumps from Facebook and Google into government
storage facilities for later mining, the 4th Amendment's freedom from "unreasonable
search and seizure" looks like a relic from the days of black-and-white movies.
But this technological arms race has two sides. For every insecure browser
or email service, there are several that are, at least so far, beyond the
reach of government and corporate spies. A good place to start figuring out
how to use them is FixTracking.com,
which highlights services like DoNotTrackMe, a blocker of "third-party trackers",
and DuckDuckGo, an anonymous search engine.
PRISM Breakis a more extensive site
that lists free anti-surveillance tools by category, i.e, browser, search
engine, email service, etc.
Also of possible interest is RetroShare, an "Open
Source cross-platform, Friend-2-Friend and secure decentralized communication
platform. It lets you to securely chat and share files with your friends and
family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt
all communication. RetroShare provides file sharing, chat, messages, forums
and channels..."
And this TED talk by Gary Kovacs, titled Tracking
the Trackers, highlights a very cool piece of technology.
I can't vouch for any of this yet but will be trying some of the services
listed here over the next few months. More about them then.
