From Atlantic Wire:
Complaining about the government is a key part of being American, the first amendment to the Constitution.
But it seems like a bit of a trickier proposition these days, with the government listening to everything you say online. In the interest of preserving your freedoms and bolstering our fair nation, here is the full articulation of the deeply paranoid and complex life you must live in order to assure that the government leaves you alone.
Before we begin, we'll note that technically the NSA isn't allowed to look at the stuff you do online. Thanks to the Patriot Act, it can (and does) store the metadata on phone calls Americans make every day—who was called, how long the call lasted, maybe some location data. The NSA also pulls in online content, but can't do so legally on targets in the United States. This is part of the PRISM program you may have heard about, in which the NSA can access data from an array of companies in near-real-time.
In practice, the NSA's procedures are sufficiently lax that it does collect information (content) from Americans, of course. And until 2011, it collected metadata on emails, including subject lines and to- and from-addresses.
That is the worst case scenario. Yes, the NSA is definitely slurping up scads of information about your phone calls. It probably isn't storing your Facebook chats, emails, and Skype calls. Our goal with this guide is to detail exactly what you need to do to assure that it can't, even if it wants to. As you will see, it is a cumbersome process.
For assistance in fleshing out this guide, we spoke with Micah Lee, staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
First, the really bad news.
The world learned about PRISM thanks to a series of slides leaked by Edward Snowden. Among those slides was this one.
On this slide, you can see the companies that participate in the program but also the data they offer the NSA, if the agency asks. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo (complete with trademark exclamation point), Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. All of the logos smushed into the header of the slide. And all of the companies to be avoided if you don't want any chance that the NSA can surveil what you're doing....MORE
Again: We are not saying that you should not use Facebook. What we are saying is that if you are desperate to prevent the NSA from knowing what you're doing, you shouldn't use Facebook. And there's nothing you can do to make using Facebook better—no encryption, no anything can make Facebook safe from the NSA. (We'll discuss this more a little later on.)
But it gets worse....
