Government internet monitoring
A new bill has been introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives calling for ISPs to record each and every step you take online, and punish by prison your internet provider if they dare not snoop on you.
A bill introduced to the US House of Representatives would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely.
The bill, dubbed the Safety Act by sponsor Lamar Smith, a republican congressman from Texas, would impose fines and a prison term of one year on ISPs which failed to keep full records.
Yet another erosion of privacy under the guise of protection. What can you do? If you’re an U.S. citizen and paying these jokers’ salaries, you might want to consider one of the actions suggested at the Daily Kos. But for those who expect that ISPs might begin tracking them anyway, just in case the government ever expects them to be good citizens, there are a few things you can do.
- Start using, and get your friends to use, encrypted IM chats. Simple but secure protocols like OTR are supported by Gaim on Linux and Windows, or the very cool Adium on Mac OS X.
- Make sure your browser expires all cookies the moment you close it. Cookies are small bits of information that a site can use to identify you when you return, and are the way search engines can link together your search habits.
- Use a routing engine such as Tor for at the very least your search engine access. Firefox extension FoxyProxy makes it trivial.
- If Tor access is too slow for your purposes, and you wish to anonymously route all your access, you should consider a commercial service like Metropipe.
- Start encrypting your mail. If you don’t want to go through the setup of something like GnuPG, you can always use MailVault – it’s like Hotmail but with encryption built in. If your friends use MailVault as well, everything can be encrypted automatically.
I know all these things can sound a bit overwhelming, but I’ll be happy to lend some guidance to any questions asked in the comments. I’ll also be providing a short article a day on each.
Should you just encrypt sensitive material? Absolutely not. If only a small percentage of your traffic is encrypted, it’s certain to draw attention of governments looking to track you, criminals looking to steal your information, and everything in between.
Are these things you should do if you feel you’ve got nothing to hide? Absolutely. Cardinal Richelieu once said “give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man in France, and I’ll find a reason to hang him“. When you’re living under a government that increasingly criminalizes personal activities, you should protect your privacy as much as possible.
It’s your personal freedom. If you don’t care about it, nobody will protect it for you.