“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
— Edward Snowden
With each passing day the Internet becomes increasingly important to all of us. Unfortunately, threats to your online well-being continue to mount, with increasing intensity and consequences, from a dizzying array of sources.
This page describes several tools that I believe will help you to consume and produce privately – and safely – in today’s world – digital and analog.
These are tools that I use. Some, every single day. I’ve got no personal stake, commercial or otherwise, in any of the products or services or companies mentioned below.
NordVPN A virtual private network, or VPN, creates an encrypted path between your computer and a remote ‘middleman’ server for your Internet traffic and sends it along to its destination. Your encrypted traffic is hidden even from your ISP, who sees only that you’ve connected to the middleman server.
Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you’re in New York, logging into Facebook through a VPN. Your ISP won’t know anything about your connection to Facebook or what’s in your data stream, and Facebook doesn’t know anything about your ISP, your IP address, or your location. Each sees only the VPN server acting as your intermediary.
Speaking of location, have you ever experienced YouTube’s error message, “Video is Not Available in Your Country”? NordVPN operates a worldwide network of servers so you can virtually ‘be’ anywhere you need to be. You can sidestep many/most location restrictions with a couple of clicks.
You might be thinking that the encryption and extra hops for your traffic would exact a performance penalty. It’s true. NordVPN uses the latest protocols and in practice the penalty is hardly noticeable.
But here’s why I recommend NordVPN over others. It’s their ‘no logging’ policy. Adherence to policy has been validated by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the ‘big 4’ in the auditing business. The PWC report says, in part:
Session information is periodically sent to the NordVPN authentication server for as long as the session is active. The information contains the username and the timestamp of the last session status. The aforementioned information is used to limit the amount of concurrent active user sessions and is deleted within 15 minutes after a session is terminated.
The ‘no logging’ policy means that your communications remain safe from prying eyes. They’re a Panama-based company, which may shield you – at least to the extent that’s possible for most of us – from perhaps even your government’s watchful eye.
NordVPN is a commercial, subscription-based service. But the cost is quite reasonable and they frequently offer rather deep discounts.
Find out more at https://nordvpn.com/.
Signal Signal turns your mobile phone or your desktop into a secure communication powerhouse. End-to-end encryption. Voice or video calling. SMS messages. Signal uses your existing phone number and contact list; there are no special logins or credentials to manage or forget.
Signal’s code is open source, free, and available on GitHub for anyone to examine and verify.
It’s used by journalists, professionals, executives, victims, advocates, fugitives, indeed anyone who values private communications. You might be surprised by some of the names that have endorsed the tool.
Signal is NOT big business. It’s funded by grants and donations. And it’s free.
Learn more about – and get – Signal here: https://signal.org/
Brave Browser The fastest, most powerful browsers are built upon the Chromium project. Arguably the best known example is Google Chrome. But what if I told you about a browser that’s faster than Chrome, automatically blocks ads and trackers, uses less battery on mobile, and has TOR baked right in?
That’s Brave. Developed by Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and creator of the JavaScript programming language, the open source Brave browser does all this and more. Brendan’s a big fan of privacy – just like you and me.
Brave counts – or maybe just estimates – your ‘savings’ as it runs. I’ve been using it for some time on my my work-a-day desktop and Brave reports that it’s blocked millions of trackers and ads, reduced my data consumption by tens of gigabytes and saved dozens of hours of my precious time. It’s a noticeable performance boost and I certainly see less ads. Further, my Internet security product routinely finds and deletes trackers and there have been way less of those. Wait, “way less”? Why not all?
Well, I haven’t totally abandoned other browsers. My other mainstay is Google Chrome and I still need to use it for certain things. See, some sites just don’t like Brave. I guess it’s because they insist on cramming shit down the pipe and won’t have it any other way. I’ve got a bank, for example, that absolutely refuses to allow a login from Brave. There are plenty of others. But most of the time it’s full speed ahead.
Like all Chromium-based browsers there’s a so-called ‘porn-mode’. Chrome calls it ‘Incognito’, Brave calls it ‘Private’ – whatever, it’s a sandbox in which you can gleefully accept cookies and so on, and all that juicy session data is discarded on exit.
I haven’t mentioned TOR. TOR relays your traffic through a number of servers, obfuscating your path, vastly increasing the difficulty of traffic analysis, fingerprinting, network surveillance and the like. Learn more about TOR from Wikipedia. It’s built right into Brave so nothing extra is needed to ‘go dark’ whenever you want.
It’s a good thing that Brave lives nicely alongside your other browsers. Mostly. After installing the Brave browser the Google Update Helper has an annoying habit of leaving “Unsuccessful application reconfiguration” errors with an error status code of “1603” in my logs. It figures, right? Small price to pay.
Learn more and install Brave here: https://brave.com/
VeraCrypt If you want to encrypt locally then VeraCrypt is for you. Use it to encrypt an entire disk – even your boot disk – a partition, a device like your USB thumb drive, or an entire drive. You can even create an encrypted file that acts as though it’s a separate drive. Go deep and you can build a hidden volume that remains hidden even if you’re forced to reveal the password. Very versatile!
Learn more and download VeraCrypt here: https://www.veracrypt.fr/ .
Proton Mail Incorporated in Switzerland, with their servers in Switzerland, ProtonMail offers end-to-end encryption for secure email. Location is important – Switzerland has kick-ass privacy laws.
This, from their website:
ProtonMail’s infrastructure resides in Europe’s most secure datacenter, underneath 1000 meters of solid rock.
You hold your encryption keys, meaning even they cannot decrypt your messages. Therefore they cannot share your encrypted messages with third parties. Until recently Proton Mail stated clearly that IP logs are not retained.
But then, an article entitled ProtonMail removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy appeared in Ars Technica on September 7, 2021, calling that IP logging statement into question. I suggest reading that article for the details.
Basic accounts are free and anonymous. However, basic accounts have volume and other limitations (such as not playing nice with bulk mailers) which may incent you to step up to a paid plan.
Get your account today: https://protonmail.com/
GnuPG Public Key cryptology is some of the strongest around. The GNU Privacy Guard, GnuPG, is a free-software replacement for PGP, a storied implementation of the asymmetric-key algorithm.
It works both ways. Not only can you strongly encrypt/decrypt messages and other files, but you can also authenticate – ensuring that a sender is indeed who they claim to be.
GnuPG makes it easy to construct your own personal ‘web of trust’, generating and certifying your key pair, safely store your keys and those of others, and of course, encrypt and decrypt as needed.
The software is free. Learn more and get it here: https://gnupg.org/
Further Reading Here are a few interesting articles for your reading pleasure.
- Why the NSA’s Defense of Mass Data Collection Makes No Sense by Bruce Schneier
- Metadata = Surveillance by Bruce Schneier
- The NSA’s Word Games Explained: How the Government Deceived Congress in the Debate over Surveillance Powers by Kurt Opsahl and Trevor Timm
