Fresh documents reveal that the NSA is spying on your internet chats through a highly secretive operation known as PRISM (much like PRISON). Here’s how you can go about protecting your privacy.
The NSA utilizes the cooperation of major corporations in order to ‘team up’ and gather all of your information — even in real time. They are able to see everything you write through Facebook, Google platform tools like Google Talk, Skype chats, Apple, and other top companies. So what can be done? Well, first of all we need to find alternatives to these top internet juggernauts.
Chances are you may have already figured that this day would come when it’s open knowledge that these massive corporations have been shoveling your information into the government privacy furnace, but perhaps you weren’t sure the best course of action. Let’s get into the very first line of defense against privacy-crushing corporations and the government that feeds upon your intimate conversations online.
Securing Your Personal Chats
As of right now, the leaked documents detail how the NSA is targeting the ‘big guys’. Google and Facebook, for example, hold upwards of 90 percent of the real ‘bulk’ of spying interest. What does this mean for you? Well, they have yet to go and soak up the ‘little guys’ that use much more advanced technology to deliver a message from point A to B. And better yet, encrypted chatting plugins make spying on your personal chats within one of these smaller companies beyond difficult.
The Internet Juggernauts Are Watching
The most important thing to remember is that even if you’re ‘protected’ behind a billion IP masks and encrypted technologies, the moment that your message hits the servers of Skype or Google (through chatting on their platforms through Skype chat or Gmail), they will have access. That’s why we need to discuss protected chat programs, or at least better options.
Read: Internet Control: Obama Blames Internet for ‘Domestic Terrorism’
Even The Guardian, the publication that released the documents, explains that the NSA appears to have failed at conquering companies like Vine, LINE, Viber, Kik and KakaoTalk. Whether or not that is true does not necessarily matter, as we are going past that. Vine, for example, is large enough that it is certainly on the NSA’s list of domination. That, and we’re talking about an app that doesn’t go the extra mile to encrypt your communications.
Practical Options
Instead, here are some steps to get on a protected chat program for mobile and PC. One that isn’t large enough for the NSA to bother with and protects your chats without use of major servers:
Off the Grid: Abandon Skype, Google Chat, Facebook chat, and all of the top clients like AIM. This is obvious, but you need to at the very least use Pidgin with the encryption plugin if you need to remain active on these chat programs for whatever reason. Even with Pidgin’s encryption, though, you’ll still be going through the servers of internet titans like Google.
