Ask HN: Since watching CitizenFour, or previously reading about the widespread surveillance conducted by governments - what changes have you made to how you conduct your life online? Have you adopted any new practices, or stopped or started using any new services?<p>It would be interesting to see what effect this has had on how people, especially technically included people behave and conduct themselves online. This could include technical solutions you have adopted or might include how you use, or view services which you previously trusted with your data.<p>Myself, I have switched my email provider away from one of the 'big three'. I have started taking an interest in more 'usable' applications of encryption and have started talking to people about the ramifications of the information brought to light by Snowden and others.
I changed some stuff, but it was when the reports came, not because of the movie.<p>My changes:<p>- Don't use gmail for private email. Self hosted it instead.<p>- Switched to Firefox (from Chrome), changed my addons (https everywhere, privacy badger and mublock).<p>- Deleted my facebook account.<p>- Tried to get my friends to use a self-hosted irc server + mumble instead of skype - but that didn't last for long sadly.<p>- Changed from google to duckduckgo, but I'm constantly using the !g command anyway.<p>Sigh. I don't think any of this matters much anyway.
My take on this problem is that most people here do in fact value their privacy and the fight for privacy. That's why Snowden articles rampaged this site for so long. However, the divide comes when the decision to actually change behavior arises.<p>We know what we can do for better online privacy:<p><pre><code> - Use tor for all internet activity
- Pay cash for everything; do not own any credit cards,
or use a service like Blur
- Bank only with banks that don't share our data
- Don't use a modern smartphone
- Use PGP for all email
</code></pre>
The list goes on and on, but who here does any of these things? Who wants to sacrifice the convenience of paying with a credit card online and managing their banking with Mint? The threat of privacy violations is not real to many people right now. They either can't or don't extrapolate the ramifications of losing their privacy in the future, or don't weigh the imposing risk as high enough to alter behavior.<p>Have I changed the way I conduct myself online? Absolutely. I do four of the five things I listed above but I could <i>never</i> imagine a small percentage, let alone a vast majority of people implementing them in their day to day lives. That's the core of the problem that we need to solve first.
I've started to despair a bit more about both technological and political solutions. I'm trying to adjust to the idea that nothing that happens online is private, and real privacy requires something more like tradecraft than mass adoption of encryption technologies.
After reading Glenn Greenwald's book, I supported <a href="https://protonmail.ch/" rel="nofollow">https://protonmail.ch/</a>, an encrypted email service based in the EU (Switzerland -edit: no it is not, should have said "Europe"-). It's currently in beta, I'm waiting for custom domain support and apps. The complete focus on "but Americans are protected" as an excuse for the NSA spying makes me actively seek out local services that are privacy aware. I use Telegram with encrypted chats for many conversations now. I found this service as an alternative to digital ocean: Transip.nl. I do wonder how my rights are when I pick an Amsterdam based data center for my droplet though. I know MS actively protected user data from Ireland which is good, whatever their reasons are.
I also switched to using mobile websites in mobile FF instead of installing many intrusive apps. Mobile responsive website are often as good as apps and better for sharing links.
I've always browsed in a sandbox only, since the revelations however I also bought a couple of vps and now tunnel my traffic through one of the servers. This is a very cheap measure, 15$ a month, that probably increases your privacy but also attracts more attention to yourself. A more inconspicuous solution is probably a public vpn service, but those servers are not under your control and you won't be able to make sure that the service does what the advertisements promise.<p>I don't bother much with email encryption or pgp, I've written down email as a loss in the privacy department and don't bother with trying/hoping my emails are private. So my gmail/hotmail/yahoo inboxes are for fluffy stuff only that doesn't really matter.<p>Mostly if I need to securely communicate with someone it will be on a private irc server where everybody has his/her own certificates and I can check to see if the server is untouched etc.
I started using TextSecure with my closest friends, but not after the documentary, after the first Snowden revelations.<p>I'm also very cautious about using non-HTTPS sites these days, or using sites with broken HTTPS. I sent my bank an email about their poor HTTPS configuration as well.<p>I also intend to use EFF's CA for all my future sites, regardless of what type of site it is and whether it actually "needs" HTTPS or not.<p>I'm much more careful about what I share through Gmail/Hangouts. I use 2FA for Gmail now, but I know it's useless against the NSA, because Google defaults to SMS-based 2FA (and the wireless networks are completely owned by the NSA), regardless of whether you chose SMS or Authenticator 2FA. It's mainly to protect against other "regular" hackers.<p>I plan to start using FIDO-ready hardware tokens this year, and I won't change my phone until the new ones have strong support for local fingerprint recognition/FIDO.<p>I try to use as few Microsoft services as possible: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...</a>.<p>I haven't managed to move off Windows yet, but I might in a few years time. What most people don't realize is that Microsoft gives NSA "back doors" on a daily basis. It's all the zero-day vulnerabilities they share with them <i>months</i> before Microsoft gets around to fixing them. That's time in which the NSA can exploit those vulnerabilities. And now, unfortunately, Apple is going to do the same (technicaly giving them to the DHS...but I think we all know those are going to the NSA, too).<p><a href="http://bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html" rel="nofollow">http://bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-sw...</a>
<i>So a few people have moved to a few different services that provide more privacy.</i><p>The truth is that the King has always been able to have anything intercepted ever since the first letter was written. Way before 9/11 GCHQ/NSA had things pretty covered and they certainly had capabilities to fully bug anyone of actual interest. You know these people even have your school reports if they want to dig back that far?<p>What has changed is that one can talk about security matters without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. That is about it for me.
This is something I thought about it for a long time, too. I've been following this for years and was always suspicious about all the "free" services and what their motivation is behind it all.<p>Here is a list of apps/extensions I use:<p>- Firefox with disconnect.me, HTTPS everywhere, Adblock.<p>- Never EVER use Google for search. Always use DuckDuckGo.<p>- Deleted my Facebook account.
- Never ever use Skype (I refuse anyone who wants to use skype) There are other alternatives.<p>- Whenever possible I use a VPN (mine it privateinternetaccess)<p>- Never use any storage services like Dropbox, OneDrive, GDrive, etc.<p>Now that being said, I struggle with some "habits" and alternatives. These are:<p>- Google Apps, especially email. There is a reason why it works and so many people use it. I've tried Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Airmail, Outlook, etc. But somehow always go back to gmail :-(<p>On another note, I wonder what people use for an operating system?!?<p>I myself use MacOS X. I run many servers, all of them are Ubuntu Servers. I love Linux. However for a desktop app, I need to be productive and fast. Every time I want to switch to Linux I find some app that is not working and I need to use a VM for that.<p>Is it even worth considering a switch of operating systems? Too paranoid?
No, there's nothing I can do about it, and I'm highly unlikely to be a person of interest under the mass surveillance programme, so why bother?
I don't think I've changed a single thing since Snowden first started leaking stuff. That's not intentional and I'm not advocating that, I just haven't. I don't want the government reading my shit but at the end of the day, I guess I don't have anything I care about hiding enough to go to the trouble of hiding it.
- I haven't changed anything about my habits. There's probably 10+ years of stuff already available to them anyway. A change of habits is probably a significant event when studying someone's timeline.<p>- I did start looking into some ways to communicate more securely/anonymously if I really needed to do that but I am not confident teaching others to do the same (so talk in person with your phones in the fridge!).<p>- I ordered a couple of Schneier books and the Glenn Greenwald book and I'm going to try the Matasano challenges and start studying secure practices to hopefully become a more security-minded developer.<p>- I will probably not live in the USA for any longer than I have to, but I need more skills and experience before I can really change countries but frankly I have no idea where I would go that would be safe.
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/#united-states-of-secrets-(part-one)" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec...</a> and part two and citizenfour are all must watch... from some of the comments many have not seen all of these.
No I have not changed a thing. I've always assumed that they were watching everything. Why else would cell phone providers suddenly not charge for services like gps? Or the fact that Microsoft lost its monopoly case against Netscape. How is providing something free a monopoly case? It doesn't exist to protect businesses.
I started using MEGAsync instead of Dropbox. As a non-american I think this is one of the few ways I might be able to change things. Maybe the recent pressure from payment processors means that it works?
The biggest change I made is not talking online about how I protect myself from surveillance. This thread is probably innocuous. But if I were watching one of you already, I would be very interested in hearing what you had to say about how you protect yourself, particularly if you did me the favor of analyzing its weak points for me.
I live under assumption that what has been uncovered by Snowden is true since the early 2000's.<p>I assume that for the last ten years all my online identities are pseudo-anonymous in the very best case and that all my communications meta data and content is logged and has been, is or is going to be scrutinized by TPTB. And that should anyone be interested, my full profile along with all my social network is or can be made available.
No. I have no need to. There are better things to do with my time.<p>It's like saying I won't drive my car on the street because the police are watching you. But the police are looking for bad guys, not me. I'm not a bad guy.<p>I see so many people trying to block the police from doing their work finding bad guys. They don't want road checks for drunk drivers but then complain when a drunk driver kills someone. They don't want license plate scans for criminals and drug trafficking yet complain when they aren't caught.<p>They don't want the NSA scanning internet traffic and email yet complain they didn't catch the Boston bombers and others ahead of time while actively protesting the same thing.<p>I fear people like Snowden more than anything else.
Citizenfour is suspiciously well produced. And Edward Snowden is extremelly good. This all is probably the stage in which we realise of this and all is simply going according to the agenda.<p>"THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society consti- tute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smooth- ly functioning society." ~ Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (1928), Chapter 1 - Organizing the Chaos