How individuals evade NSA's global network monitoring

The NSA's "massive surveillance" data center in the Utah State Desert can screen and analyze most of the world's network traffic, from geographical locations, audio and video files, e-mail, instant messaging, social networks and other digital documents. Of course, it's not just the NSA that can track our digital footprint, but in this time of personal privacy, all kinds of government and business companies can master our words and every move. As a common netizen, is there a reliable way to protect themselves?

Earlier, the Washington Post had given five personal information privacy security advice to avoid NSA surveillance, including using Tor to surf the web, using Silent Circle to make a phone call. In fact, the privacy of the Internet is not limited to the NSA's monitoring, the past few years, the Chinese Internet company's user accounts of large-scale leaks and Android mobile phone malicious use of personal privacy and property threats also make consumers personal privacy to save their own action imminent.

In the anti-virus software of all free, collective failure today, in this ritual collapse of the bad, unprecedented dangerous network era, everyone should be personal privacy protection of "wild survival" skills have some understanding. The following IT manager network summarizes the current network of secrecy methods summarized as follows:

1. Use the Firefox encryption plug-in Tor anonymous browsing

Using the Tor anonymous browsing agent prevents network browsing data from being intercepted, so greedy internet companies don't know what ads to push for you, and the NSA doesn't know who you're communicating with. Snowden, an informer at the NSA surveillance gate, was photographed using Tor to surf the internet in real time.

Tor is a free Firefox anonymous browsing plugin that encrypts network traffic data and can be used with Firefox browsers on PCs, Macs, and Linux platforms. But the price of encryption is sacrificing the speed of some browsers. (Editor's note: But it may not work in China)

It is worth noting that Tor is not foolproof, for example, the 2011 hacker attacked the Dutch certification authority Niginotar, creating a number of fake digital certificates for Facebook, Google, Skype and Tor to monitor Iranian internet users. Similarly, according to ArsTechnica's report, Usenix's paper, the researchers found that Tor also had loopholes that could be used to identify BitTorrent users.

2. Apply encrypted chat with OTR

In an interview with the British Guardian, Snowden used an unnamed OTR (no record) chat software that encrypts data from chat sessions, and many free clients support OTR, including Cryptocat and Mac Adium on OS X and im+ for Android and iphone smartphones.

3. Use Silent Circle to encrypt voice, email, etc.

Silent Circle is a new U.S. local personal communications encryption service, at the same time as the NSA monitoring door burst, Silent Circle Company announced the four major services of the annual fee reduction, these services include: mobile phone voice encryption, SMS encryption, VoIP voice and Video call encryption and e-mail encryption. The company claims that through an independent audit the service provided does not have any monitoring back door.

It is noteworthy that if the proprietary cryptographic services of Silent Circle are used, both parties must be silent circle users. Silent Circle's proprietary cryptographic services are attractive to high-end business users or activists concerned about information leaks.

4.Android Mobile phone users use RedPhone to encrypt calls and text messages

Android users are blessed, and Whispersystems's Open-source software RedPhone and TextSecure provide secure calls and SMS encryption. Similarly, both parties must install RedPhone client software at the same time. Where TextSecure is used to encrypt text messages.

RedPhone and TextSecure are currently audited by a third party to ensure there is no backdoor.

5. Encrypt data with PGP

PGP, as well as open source software GPG with PGP functions, can be used to encrypt data and emails, which are a bit of a learning threshold, and comrade Snowden even had to self-control a teaching video sent to the Guardian's correspondent Greenwald.

6. Cell phone shutdown, unplug the battery

This approach sounds a bit drastic, but when you don't use your cell phone, it's a habit that prevents your phone from leaking your location to a nearby mobile base station. The ACLU's chief scientist, Christopher Soghoian, told The Washington Post: "The laws of physics tell us that you can't hide your location information from mobile operators." ”

7. Buy and use disposable mobile phones

If you're just shopping online, registering for a Web service, or talking to strangers and not revealing your true identity, the easiest way to do that is to buy a one-time prepaid cheap phone (card). Like the "Matrix" scenario, the Agent Smith didn't find you so soon after calling and dropping the phone into the sewer.

8. Stop using Windows and Mac OS OS

Believe that for many people, changing the operating system is a difficult decision, but given that Microsoft has officially admitted to submitting data to the NSA for global customers (albeit only a small part), the backdoor of the operating system has become a very real and serious problem, if you really want to get out of the Matrix and gain free access to the Internet, Then you can start thinking about various versions of Linux, including Ubuntu.

If you're a real geek, dream completely rid of the powerful Prism project monitoring, and away from various departments, businesses peeping and harassment, these points are far from enough, the designer Peng Zhong produced a more comprehensive detailed name "Escape Prism" site, listed in the browser (plugin , email, web, payment tools, social networking sites, App stores, and other open-source alternatives for potentially monitored software and web services, and interested readers can take a look.