Defund this Anti-American, Terrorist Training Center.
We have to do what we can, legally, to protect ourselves. Use encryption. Use peer-reviewed software that has been verified free of backdoors. It's all we've got.
A good place to get started is https://prism-break.org.
So, my guess is they’re grabbing random conversations, looking for harmful ‘lexicon’ words and hoping to catch a bad guy or group as a result. It sucks. I want anonymity in my emails, just like a letter.
The Govt treats everyone like a terrorist, unless they really are a terrorist.
Defund this Anti-American, Terrorist Training Center.
A handful of few tips for any privacy-conscious FReepers:
INTERNET SEARCHING
Don’t use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine that tracks your search results. You might as well be sending data straight to the NSA.
StartPage searches Google on your behalf completely anonymously. In other words, you get the exact same search results as you would with Google, except you keep your privacy.
DuckDuckGo is an independent search engine that also does not track you. Its search results are a bit more hit and miss, but they’re fairly good overall.
BROWSER
There are many excellent tools available for Firefox browser that can assist you in protecting your privacy. Here are a few of my favorites:
-User Agent Overrider: Use this to change your browser’s user agent so as to appear as generic as possible. You can get a list of the most popular user agents here.
-Adblock Edge: Use EasyList to block ads, EasyPrivacy to block trackers. Add the Fanboy social list to block Facebook buttons, etc. Social media sharing buttons track your browsing even if you don’t have an account with them.
-Self-Destructing Cookies: Accepts cookies from Web sites but deletes them automatically when the tab you’re using is closed unless you say otherwise. Fights tracking cookies that this article mentions are used by the NSA.
-HTTPS Everywhere: An extension by the EFF. Enables secure connections whenever possible.
-NoScript: One of the best security and privacy tools that Firefox has to offer. NoScript has a significant learning curve, but if you master it, you can stop most threats cold. For example, try enabling NoScript and then going to Whatismybrowser. You’ll see that it is impossible for that site to get a list of the plugins you have installed.
Keep an eye on MailPile. It’s an up-and-coming browser-based email client that aims to make it dead simple to send and receive encrypted email.
BitMessage is a decentralized, experimental alternative to email. It’s still in its early stages, so if you want to know more, you might have to ask me or a similarly knowledgeable person for help.
The Free Software Foundation has come out with an email encryption guide called “Email Self-Defense:” https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/
ORGANIZATIONS
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the premiere Internet privacy organizations.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is possibly the most ideologically “pure” technology organization out there. Its purpose it to promote open, peer-reviewed software.
Whether or not you believe “open source” is worth a darn, it’s a fact that the only way to be sure that the NSA hasn’t compromised the software you’re using to be able to see what it’s made of. You can’t do that with software like Windows.
The other thing to do is to place a signature on your emails, every email with a list of words that have been flagged. If everyone did that the NSA would not be able to sort through all the digital noise.
For example:
Bomb, jihad, Conservative, IRS, Homeland Security, Obama, Terror, Terrorist, Terrorism, Nixon, Airplane, Air port, Dirty Bomb, Radiological Device, Biological Device, Blow up, Destroy, Halal, Jews, Catholics, Holy War, Defend, Provoke, Bush, Clinton, Snuff out, Islam, Border, Immigration, Death of a President, Fatwa, Fire fight, Grenade.
Have fun with this one NSA
Obama sweeps up everything
what about that don’t people get?
when you call your bank in the Caymans,
Obama and Reid know.
I wouldn’t trust encryption with all the resources they have - odds are that they can read most of the encrypted stuff with little problem. It might take them more resources, but it sure shouldn’t be relied on and be used as a sense of security.
I believe it was US President Theodore Roosevelt who first coined the term "weasel words", and I've seen no better example than the title is this article. The number of "foreigners" targeted is irrelevant.