Friday, September 06, 2013

"NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure"

Interesting article by security guru Bruce Schneier in The Guardian here, on how to stop Government Intelligence Services accessing your data and communications. He states that he himself has been using:
"GPGSilent CircleTailsOTRTrueCryptBleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about"

to avoid NSA surveillance while working on the Edward Snowden papers for The Guardian. His concluding remarks:
Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.
There was some speculation recently that NSA/GCHQ mathematicians had developed a new theory of large number factorization which would allow feasible attacks on Internet security protocols such as https. This always looked a bit dubious and now appears not to be the case. If you can intercept all the traffic and install back-doors on commercially-available cryptography software, then hacking the theory is purely academic!