My PGP Key

[MrBogosity]

Especially after the news about the NSA wiretapping scandal, people are becoming even more security-conscious—and that’s a good thing. Alarmingly, your private encrypted data may not be safe if the NSA demands that websites with your encrypted information turn over the decryption key, the key that can decrypt it all!

There’s one way to protect yourself: PIE, or Pre-Internet Encryption. The idea is that you (or actually, a program on your computer) encrypt the data before sending it to its destination. So if you encrypt a file to put on your cloud drive, and the NSA demands this data from your cloud provider along with the encryption key, then when they decrypt it they’re left with just the pseudorandom noise that is your encrypted data. Since the key remains solely in your possession, they have no way of obtaining it and no way of decrypting your data!

Of course, if you lose your private key, or forget the passphrase that unlocks it, you’ve lost your data forever! So keep that in a secure place.

This is an excellent way to send secure emails. You send the other party your public key, which encrypts email that only you can decrypt, and uses that to send you email. If you have the other party’s public key, you get two-way encryption that nobody but the two of you can read!

By far, the best way of doing this is Gnu Privacy Guard. This is proven secure encryption using the PGP standard and is open source software that has been vetted by many security experts. For email, I use EnigMail to send encrypted mail through Mozilla Thunderbird. If you want to send me encrypted email, just install OpenPGP and import my public key. It’s on pgp.mit.edu as Shane Killian (check the Photo ID to make sure you’ve got the right one) or you can copy and paste the key from here:

Code Select Expand

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.21 (MingW32)
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=xTKA
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

If you have one, feel free to share it here.

[Goaticus]

Supposedly there will soon be easier to use encryption.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/29/nsa-fk-off-coming-soon-open-source-encry

NSA F**k Off: Coming Soon Open Source Encryption for People Like Me

Ronald Bailey|Jul. 29, 2013 4:08 pm

SnowdenAPEncryption is not fun and easy. I fooled around a bit the Pretty Good Privacy and found it frustrating and complicated to use. Fortunately, Edward Snowden's revelations of just how intrusive the national security surveillance state is has now provoked efforts to create user friendly encryption.

BlockPrism is a non-profit project launched by a group of computer science students at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and a mechanical engineering student at Stanford University in Palo Alto. They want to make encryption easy by creating programming tools that allow seamless integration across social media, without the user having to go through any trouble to encrypt his or her messages. They explain in an email that as a prototype that they have programmed a Chrome browser plugin, available in Facebook Chat here (video). In order to complete development and to make it available on mobile devices (iOS and Android), they have launched the indiegogo campaign.

The "zero knowledge" cloud storage company SpiderOak has developed Crypton, an open-source software project that aims to make it easy for software developers to create "zero knowledge" applications as way to stymie online surveillance efforts. As Infoworld reported:

    Crypton is essentially a framework that allows applications to encrypt data within a web browser before it is sent to a remote server.

    Advancements in web browsers over the last few years have made Crypton possible. The JavaScript engines in web browsers are much more powerful and can handle intensive encryption tasks such as generating the key needed to lock and unlock encrypted data....

    Users have peace of mind that even if a company was subpoenaed by a court, the company would not be able to decrypt the data, making it useless. ... The encryption keys remain on a user's computer.

The bottom-up creativity inherent in the technologies of freedom gives me the hope that they will always eventually outrun the top-down centralized technologies of oppression.

For some relatively simple ways to annoy government spies, see my column, "How To Keep Your Government From Spying on You."

[MrBogosity]

Supposedly there will soon be easier to use encryption.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/29/nsa-fk-off-coming-soon-open-source-encry

GnuPG is open source and has been around for many years.