secure your future

The topic of our Right To Privacy is, to me, massively important. Over the last few years of the establishment of the Internet & our discovery of its’ possibilities & uses, we have been up against massive investment by State actors – led by the USA’s NSA – who have poured resource beyond belief into capturing every single little bit of data communicated by everyone. We, the Internet-using public, were largely unaware of the gargantuan scale of this privacy-invading monitoring until Edward Snowden & Wikileaks did their thing.

Ed Snowden 

“Use anything by Open Whisper Systems” – Edward Snowden, privacy advocate & whistleblower

I don’t buy the “if you’ve got nothing to hide then it won’t matter if we look” line – ostriches sticking their heads in sand is not a viable line of defense either. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Well, investigating agencies can decide to manipulate your plain text SMS messages, and their $1500/hr lawyers can convince juries that innocent conversation was heinous conspiracy. Plus, I have the right to privacy. This is not a totalitarian one-world government, much as the US would like to believe.

(Off topic – did you know that they have passed legislation claiming all land on Earth that is not claimed by another government? WTF? So, according to them, if a new island pops up outside of a 200-mile economic zone, it’s theirs. Because they made a law saying so.)

Thanks largely to heroic security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, we have the solution. Signal Private Messenger is a complete package encryption utility for Android & iDevice. Using an innovative set of encryption technologies, Signal is – with current silicon-based computer power, uncrackable. And provided free to us, not even ad-supported, free.

Trusted because you don’t need to, it’s open source, go read the code – look for NSA back doors, you won’t find any – then compile, download & install your own binary package. Or, just download from your App Store.

Integrating with Android as a full SMS replacement, encrypting to other Signal users, send plain SMS to those you haven’t enlightened yet, Signal also contains an encrypted voice calling feature – say whatever is on your mind safely.

I regularly post about this essential communication tool. I view it as a responsibility to inform everyone. If you’re communicating with me, I insist on using Signal. For the more paranoid among us, there exists methods to really obfuscate your communication tools by associating your Signal to a different number from your mobile phone or to even install on an iPod Touch for ultimate deniability.

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