How NSA’s Prism affects you, and how to protect yourself from being spied on

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/157777-how-nsas-prism-affects-you-and-how-to-protect-yourself-from-being-spied-on

by michmaz • 13 years ago

54 15 13 years ago

Nothing changed, because everything was already assumed. I still run my own servers (in Finland), which provide only strongly encrypted connections for private communication. From public cloud, I only use services which contain only 100% public information. My every social medium post is public, so what if someone snoops? Googling would already reveal almost same data.

volume• 13 years ago

Just for the sake of evaluation your stance on security - what about people with physical access to your server in Finland? Do you trust them? For your 100% public information - can't a Bad Guy assimilate what's found to formulate a pretty good picture of who you are, and use that info indirectly to achieve whatever further objectives the Bad Guy has?

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

Yes, but this is to avoid casual, non targeted wholesale surveillance and analysis which is what PRISM is. So would work to hide your local traffic from your ISP and avoid Gmail leaking all your emails. It would be better if it was hosted in Iceland instead of Finland because the EU has data retention laws and Iceland told the FBI to piss off when they showed up to seize wikileaks servers.

It's not Julien Assange, or blackhat on the run from the feds level security. For that you have dee.su live o/s or your own custom build, tunneling Tor through a mixmaster network like Jondonym to prevent easy traffic analysis and bitmessage or Nym servers with PGP for emails. In fact you probably would'nt even be using Xorg and all it's attack variables you would be using tmux shells w/lynx and running Tor in a chroot, using virtualized routing tables and behind a pf firewall. You would also be wearing a Roy Orbison wig and sunglasses everytime you moved your safehouse from one location to the next, and never use anything except hacked wireless for a one time connection nowhere near where you live or cameras.

lemming• 13 years ago

Ironically enough, they exhort their users to install HTTPS Everywhere and yet it doesn't work on their site.

sp332• 13 years ago

If you change the address in your browser to https:// it serves you the page using their CDN's (Akamai) certificate. HTTPS Everywhere and most browsers reject this because the extremetech.com site is not listed as one of the sites that the certificate covers.

logn• 13 years ago

I think that's a good sign. It suggests the writers here are not controlled by a corporate bureaucracy.

alexpopescu• 13 years ago

Lately if I see a post starting with "Unless you have been living under a rock", I stop reading.

stack0v3erfl0w• 13 years ago

Why?

khairul• 13 years ago

Because it's a tired, overabused cliche.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

I dislike it particularly because of the implication of stupidity: "I believe only stupid people won't know this, but I'm going to tell you anyway".

In general it's poor form to assume readers know anything - consider (for example) a future lay-reader who is trying to find out this information.

cmac2992• 13 years ago

Using voice analysis to figure out who you are? Please....

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

Ironically Ghostery blocked 21 items on that page.

How NSA’s Prism affects you, and how to protect yourself from being spied on

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