Tactics for reducing your NSA footprint
First, WHY would anybody want to do this? Obviously if you are involved in criminal activity or sedition, you would want to go under the radar. I assume that would not apply to most of us. However, the path we are on certainly puts people with ANY political activism at risk. Want to attend a rally? An Occupy activity? Or just exercise free speech rights? These are the things that increasingly will be seen as harmful to the state. Considering that the government is able to take our money to construct data vaults that are practically infinite, housing records that will span decades, you might want to think about taking some actions now that will make it just a little more difficult for the NSA to monitor you.
And I freely stipulate that there is absolutely nothing you can do to completely avoid detection. If they want to go after you, it will happen. But there are some things you can do that will give you less of a footprint on the NSA systems.
Here are a few things that spring to mind.
1) Avoid cloud services. Don't store important documents on servers that are easily absorbed by the NSA. Keep your documents on your own computers, hard drives, thumb drives etc. Don't store them on the network. Don't use a cloud-based backup service. There are other ways to take safe backups without just handing the data over to others.
2) Look into aggressive encryption if you store any documents you really don't want prying eyes to see.
3) Avoid the biggest email hosts. It is a lot of work for the NSA to go after every little email server, so they will work mostly with gmail, hotmail, etc.
4) When you participate at politically-charged sites, avoid providing information that makes it easy to identify yourself. Of course, this site and others could eventually receive court orders that demand they provide all profile information, including your email address. But until that happens, you should be able to remain mostly out of the NSA's cross-hairs.
I don't know if there are any effective strategies for cell phones. Is there an equivalent of proxy servers for phone calls?
I would also be curious about ways to reduce the exposure related to credit card purchases. I haven't heard that the NSA is monitoring our purchases yet. But if they are not yet, they will.
I'd appreciate any tips that others might be able to share.
= new reply since forum marked as read
