Recently, The Guardian published a lengthy essay on the NSA scandal. We thought quite a lot of it was very good, so it is linked here:
Justin Turrell commented, "I think this is a good writeup (if a bit long) because:
1) it frankly equates surveillance with slavery;
2) it takes data mining companies like Facebook and Gmail to task equally with govt agencies; and
3) it recommends use of encryption and development of privacy-enhancing products as a solution."
Those are all very important ideas. Probably the most significant is item 3, recommending that people get and use encryption. At SilentVault, we are developing a privacy-enhancing product built on the Voucher Safe technology.
You should get a plug-in for your e-mail programme, such as the Enigmail plug-in that works with Mozilla Thunderbird. You should generate PGP keys. PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy" and remains the widely accepted standard. First developed by Phil Zimmerman and others, and previously available (as far back as 1991 or so) as an MS DOS command line programme, PGP is now the basis for an open source standard, Open PGP.
Enigmail is an easy-to-use PGP plug-in for Thunderbird. Encryption is therefore easy to use. If you need help with encryption, please comment here and we'll get you some help on the topic.