Keeping your messages safe from prying eyes

With the current political environment your privacy is being chipped away more and more each day. Much of the debate is based on the idea that if you are not doing anything wrong then you should have no worry about your information being viewed by the government, this in itself is a fallacy. Another debate is that they need the ability to view everything to protect you from terrorists that are bent on harming your way of life, this is a long discussion in itself, but not here.

With the next few entries I will discuss ways to keep your messages private between you and the people you want to exchange information with. The key ones will be E-mail, IM and file exchange using encryption and encryption type programs. Some of them require usage of special programs that you and the person your are exchanging information with need to have set up. It is quite simple to do, I will also give some tips and tricks on using them. All of the applications I will talk about are open source so if you wish to view how they work you can.

The E-mail program I will be using in the discussion is Thunderbird with some plugins. It has clients for windows, mac and Linux, I use this because it seems to be on of the more extendable clients for email. It will be used with a public key / private key clients to encrypt and decrypt the messages. For exchanging IM between you and another person I will be expanding on pidgin, it is a multi-service client, that is it works with yahoo, AIM, jabber, exchange and some others. The last group of topics will be encrypting your files, so if you travel you can be generally sure your files will be safe from prying eyes. This is not the entire list of applications you could use, nor is there a guarantee that the data can not be decrypted at some time in the future. As technology changes one never knows, but for now its mostly safe.

I will add different programs as I go from time to time under the same heading, so I hope it will spur you into keeping an eye on your data and who may be snooping on it, for good or evil.