Micah Lee: What are some operational security practices you think everyone should adopt? Just useful stuff for average people.
Edward Snowden: [Opsec] is important even if you’re not worried about the NSA. Because when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you’re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you’re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you’re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things. It’s to reclaim a level of privacy.
The first step that anyone could take is to encrypt their phone calls and their text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It’s free, and you can just download it immediately. And anybody you’re talking to now, their communications, if it’s intercepted, can’t be read by adversaries. [Signal is available for iOS and Android, and, unlike a lot of security tools, is very easy to use.]
You should encrypt your hard disk, so that if your computer is stolen the information isn’t obtainable to an adversary — pictures, where you live, where you work, where your kids are, where you go to school. [I’ve written a guide to encrypting your disk on Windows, Mac, and Linux.]
Use a password manager. One of the main things that gets people’s private information exposed, not necessarily to the most powerful adversaries, but to the most common ones, are data dumps. Your credentials may be revealed because some service you stopped using in 2007 gets hacked, and your password that you were using for that one site also works for your Gmail account. A password manager allows you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable, but you don’t have the burden of memorizing them. [The password manager KeePassX is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.]
Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 12Byron Deeter is right, but perhaps he's holding back on his reasoning. Silicon Valley is all about platform, and platform plays only come about once every ten to twenty years. They come like great waves of change, not replacing the previous waves as much as taking away and running with the future. Cloud Computing is the fourth great wave. It will replace the PC and Network Computing waves as the future. It is the target of all developers and entrepreneurs. The four great waves are mainframe, workstation, pc and networked pc, and the Internet. Cloud Computing takes the Internet to such a high level of functionality that it will now replace the pc-netwroking wave. It's going to be enormous. Especially as enterprises move their business productivity and data / content apps from the desktop/workgroup to the Cloud. Enormous. The key was the perfect storm of 2008, where mobility (iPhone) converged with the standardization of tagged PDF, which converged with the Cloud Computing application and data model, which all happened at the time of the great financial collapse. The financial collapase of 2008 caused a tectonic shift in productivity. Survival meant doing more with less. Particularly less labor since cost of labor was and continues to be a great uncertainty. But that's also the definition of productivity and automation. To survive, companies were compelled to reduce labor and invest in software/hardware systems based productivity. The great leap to a new platform had it's fuel; survival. Social applications and services are just the simplest manifestation of productivity through managed connectivity in the Cloud. Wait until this new breed of productivity reaches business apps! The platform wars have begun, and it's for all the marbles. One last thought. The Internet was always going to win as the next computing platform wave. It's the first time communications have been combined and integrated into content, and vast dat
