Are You Addicted to the Drug Called Convenience?

Electronic “government”* spying has been occurring for decades.  Recently, it has become a hot-topic because of Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing.  The news of this, however, is not a new thing.  There has been warrantless wiretapping, NSA spying, and all sorts of communications databasing happening since W. Bush was the ostensible “leader” of the land-of-the-free, and before.

The question now poses itself to all of us, how hooked are we, on this aptly named “web” of convenience?  Do you use GMail, Google, Verizon Wireless, text-messaging, Bing, Outlook.com, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other NSA honeypots?  If so, will you stop?

What will you use instead?  There are secure alternatives without giving up all convenience.  In fact, simply using Mailvelope encryption for email encryption will cover your email privacy, at least in terms of the email contents.  Who you are communicating with is still an open book, but at least the conversation will be private.

PGP SMS Lite is a great application for the Android that encrypts text messages.

Also, consider getting off of the webmail habit.  Switching to Thunderbird with Enigmail could be a better option.

If you use Chrome, Chromium, or Firefox, download “DoNotTrackMe” to disallow the trackers that are set on your computer.

I believe that anything can be cracked or circumvented, if enough focused attention is put on it by the men and women who refer to themselves as the “NSA”, but if 330 million Americans all do what I suggested here then the “NSA” is no better off than they were back in, say, 1984, for example.