My data and PRISM

Everyday we can read about Prism in the big media. Prism is a data-mining software used by the NSA, the national secret service of the USA.

That something like this will happen in the future could have been expected. Until now we’ve seen technology like that only in SiFi kind of action movies, like 24hours for example.

Many of us thought to be save, our privacy is thought to be a far more higher good than the information interests of security agencies. Everyone who said, hey guys, you’re wrong, was stamped to be neurotic, anxious, way to fearful of big brother government. Now after parts of the truth surfaced, people are upset.

The German government wants the US government to immediately release all informations concerning data-mining of German citizens. Who do they believe they are? Are they serious, that the NSA will give them any more information, then the one could be found in the media? If they really believe that, they are simply naive. Besides that, the German government just passed a law, called „Gesetz zur Neuregelung der Bestandsdatenauskunft“, in English something like „act revising the inventory data information“. This law allows security agencies to break into any data-privacy of a person, even if the person just got a parking ticket. It gives the authorities access to passwords, email accounts, chat protocols.

Everything what is considered in non digital live as private and is protected by special laws.

To listen to your phone conversation or to search your home, authorities need a warrant signed by a judge. In digital live, no warrant is needed, they just get the access. And the funny thing in Germany is, neither Social Democrats nor the Greens opposed this law.

The EC also makes pressure that a law about the retention of telecommunication data is passed in every member state.

So why they are all now that upset about what the NSA is doing? Because the NSA is not storing the data by itself, instead they use Apple, Google, Facebook etc. as free mass-storage places of people’s personal data? Or what?

We all should now by now, that modern governments have no interest in protecting civil rights, their interest is to protect their own power and influence.

Just recently two young German students got denied entrance to the US, because the border authorities accused them of planning illegal actions in the US, as proof the authorities showed the students private chats from Facebook.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote: „They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.“ He also said: „Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.“ This is the development we are seeing right now.

In Turkey the media didn’t reported in the beginning about the protests on Taksim Square, later lawyers were arrested and Erdogan, the PM of Turkey declared the protestors to be vandalists etc. In Germany a demonstration against the power of banks was beaten down by police and in the US the police was doing nearly the same before in New York with the occupy movement, which was internally marked as being terrorists by the FBI.

Our societies are loosing their liberty, their freedom for which so many people have fought and died in the past.

The sad thing is, most of the people are not interested. Panem et circensem, bread and games, worked already well at the time of the Roman Empire and it’s still functioning.

If you as reader are interested to protect your privacy at least a little bit, here are some tips:

First some big NOs, don’t do this, don’t…

  • publish anything on social media, like Facebook or Twitter, you don’t want to read in the newspaper
  • chat about personal things with people using Facebook Chat, AIM, Yahoo Chat, Skype or simular
  • pass on personal information through email without encrypting it
  • save or backup personal data on any cloud service, if a software doesn’t give you a choice like Things, drop it
and here is what you can do:

  • use encryption in e-mail, like PGP, GnuPGP or OpenPG
  • use your personal hardware for backup or
  • use point to point encryption on rented server space
  • avoid or minimize the use of personal data
  • treat unencrypted email, like sending a postcard
  • use Jabber also called XMPP for chatting with a server you can trust via SSL/TLS additional an end-to-end encryption can be used with OpenPGP. The encryption is integrated with some clients like Adium for Mac
  • use TOR for brownsing, if you want to sat annonym
  • use https whenever possible
For encrypting their are meanwhile easy to use software packets on the market, professional solutions and open Source software as well.

Here are some links:

Generell: GnuPG, OpenPGP

The TOR project

MacOS (for AppleMail): GnuPG

iOS (iPhone, IPad): oPenGP (not free)

Android: The Guardian Project

For Thunderbird: Enigmail

Windows: GPG4Win

Payed solution from Symantec for example

Point to Point encryption:

Most OSes have that capability built in for the local hard drive, called full disk encryption. Check Point offers a more professional solution for the Mac. There are many solutions on the market, free open source solutions and payed services. The important point is that only you have the key and the control over the key and not the hosting company.

The Cloud

Happy new year everybody 🙂

Today I kicked my getting things done app in the trash.

Getting things done is a book and Method by David Allen. The method originally works with paper and boxes and helps you to get organized and things out of one mind to free the mind for being creative instead of storing stuff there and having to think on that, what’s still not yet done.

Naturally a lot of applications have grown around this idea. Quite some time I decided to use Things from Culture Code. There is a desktop and a iPhone application which were synchronizing over the local network. The user interface of the application is neat and clean and I liked it a lot. I was pretty happy with it.

So what made me trash it?

Culture code decided to update Things to Things 2.0 and with that update they introduced synchronization over their own cloud service and announced very proud how many users are already having an account there. Theres nothing wrong with that, but they also decided to drop local synchronization. So if I want to use the new version, I’d be forced to use their cloud service, a server I have no control of and leave there all my to do lists including all the personal or business information, which I might have noted in one or the other task of my to-do list.

I’m amazed actually, how many people blindly trust a company and leave their personal data on the companies server. Didn’t we all learn meanwhile, that google scans the mails of their gmail service to place proper advertising to the user? So why should we trust a software company, especially when they just abandon the local service, so if I want to continue using the software, I’m forced to use their cloud service.

It becomes even more interesting, if one knows that Culture Code is a German company and the German Ministry of inner affairs is currently working on some laws to give security service access to data in the cloud, meaning forcing providers to open their servers for police or other security services to access these data, preferable without any consultation of a judge. The Patriot Act of the US does this already.

Upps, you didn’t know that? You synchronize your iPhone via the Apple’s Cloud Service, store your documents on amazon’s cloud service. You think it’s all well protected by your personal password and login data. If you run your own server, you know that you have access to everything and anything stored on that machine, so has the industries.

Of course you can encrypt your data with an point to point encryption, which will make it harder for anybody to look into it and only government services or big companies will have the computing power to crack your encryption. Well and what happens, when government and industries work together? It already does as I learnt recently by an article published by the Guardian. A peaceful protest movement against the power of the banks was marked as terrorist activity by the FBI.

You might think, you don’t do anything illegal, so why should you care. We’ve seen over the past couple of years, how quickly innocent people can get into the focus of law enforcement authorities or the industries. The result is often scary. And well, we all have something to protect and be it only our privacy.

Well, I didn’t give up, organizing my to-do and getting things done in a organized way, I’m just using a different software from the omnigroup, a well know Apple development company. Omni Focus offers different ways of synchronizing the desktop and iPhone app. One of them is via Bonjour and the local network another one works via WebDAV or a file server.

These days I just learned, you can set up your own clod services with OwnCloud. OwnCloud is a software-suit based on php and a SQL-server, which can be set up on nearly any Operating-System, all you need is access to a server. This probably works also with dynamic ip addresses and a service, like dynDNS. So now I’m thinking to setup this on my server here.

So, you don’t believe me? Then check this out: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patriot-act-can-access-eu-based-cloud-data/11225