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Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts

Monday, April 8, 2019

Censorship Imperils Liberty


Justin Smith has become a voice that many Conservatives listen to attentively, I know that I do. The American Left and Globalist Left for that matter, have become so rabid in their Liberty erasing utopian fantasies they are openly becoming violent against Conservatives. After you read this essay from Justin you might just get stirred up to defend your Liberty and nation. You will learn that ongoing Internet censorship is reaching far beyond your keyboard or mobile phone. The dark evil specter of global Communism is turning classic science fiction warnings of Big Brother into modern reality.


JRH 4/8/19
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Censorship Imperils Liberty  
Truth's Dark Death

By Justin O. Smith
Sent 4/7/2019 8:34 PM

America cannot allow lies to push truth to a dark death.

Disturbing postmodern relativistic, postcolonial and social justice theories, tripe and nonsense that looks for victims under every rock has been advocated over the past four decades; and we must unequivocally reject this nonsense, in favor of the honest to God truth, since we already see destabilizing hyperreality, fallacy, propaganda, political correctness and outright Gestapo tactics used to erase our American heritage, our traditions, and our culture, in nothing less than a despicable attack on our freedom and liberty. Too many are too willing to use every deception and even any flagitious means to usher in the Democratic Party vision of an authoritarian Marxist Socialist state for America and eradicate our republic

Truth is in short supply everywhere one looks today, whether one speaks of Great Britain, China or even America. The communists and globalists, the proponents of a "New World Order" are on the rise, and they are targeting and controlling the people of the world through the internet, an array of high-handed arbitrary laws and even through tyrannical hate-speech "laws" that are not anything resembling legitimate law, since by their very nature they violate a person's human and God-given Right to speak freely on anything that crosses his mind. 

Great Britain and most of the European Union implement hate-speech laws against their own citizens, that are modeled after United Nations Resolution 16/18 and criminalize any criticism against Islam. This is the very resolution that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conspired together to attempt to get passed in the United States Senate back on December 26th 2012 in New York City, despite its clear antithetical position to the First Amendment. 

[Blog Editor: I ran out of time trying to locate info for the date 12/26/12 pertaining to the OIC, Crooked Hillary & the Senate trying to criminalize criticism of Islam. BUT there are plenty of references to Crooked Hillary working with OIC to get the USA on board for such criminalization. Here are three references among many:

o   Hello, Hillary 2016. Goodbye, First Amendment; By J.P. Moran; Townhall.com; 6/25/15 12:01 AM

o   Breaking…Democrats Introduce Measure to Condemn Criticism of Islam; By S. Noble; Independent Sentinel; 12/26/15

o   The Democrat Sharia Bill: Criminalizing Criticism of Islam; By Pamela Geller; Geller Report; 2/2/16]

In May of last year, the patriotic leaders of Britain First, Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, were arrested for distributing leaflets warning of the existential threat of Islam to all countries, during a rape trial at the Canterbury Crown Court, that culminated in the convictions of four Muslim men. Golding and Fransen were charged with religiously-aggravated harassment and convicted in the Folkestone Magistrates' Court. Golding was sentenced to four and a half months in prison, and Fransen received an even more egregious sentence of nine months. And all of this came from voicing factual evidence and truths concerning Islam and their honest and true convictions on the matter. 

Judge Justin Barron, an obvious illiberal communist activist judge similar to many here in the U.S. courts, had a hard bias against them. What should be free speech is frowned upon in the United Kingdom, as Barron declared that Golding and Fransen had a "joint intention to use the facts of the case for their own political ends". And so? No matter was it to him that their statements were true. 

In Communist China, the situation is even worse. The Great Firewall of China has for many long years blocked access to any information regarding the millions of victims of the mass-murdering dictatorship. Even the pro-censorship American tech giants, some similar to Apple who have largely agreed to Beijing's censorship demands, have been mostly blocked from China. And as though it wished to prove its hostility to internet freedom and free speech, the UN placed an actual Chinese Communist agent, who claims censorship is in the eye of the beholder, as the head of the UN International Telecommunications Union; and, as surreal as it is, this is the agency slated for assuming the role of the world internet regulator and censor.

The world watches a program straight from Big Brother emerging from its infancy. By 2020, the system will become the Social Credit System (SCS), and it will be owned and operated entirely by the Chinese Communist State. The SCS will monitor purchases, hobbies, lifestyle and even who one socializes with on any regular basis. It will note how many children one has, how well one does one's job and all the items necessary to be a model citizen, just as it will watch those who drink too much or speak ill of the government or its leaders. It will watch every citizen, and one's credit score will be based on how well one aligns their thoughts and actions with the Chinese Communist Party line. 

Four years ago, a Zhong Pei, a sixteen year old student, tried to board a train and was refused a ticket. She was also refused enrollment in her classes at her university, because she had committed the heinous crime of being her father's daughter, and the daughter of a man who had died in an automobile accident that had killed two other people. This was enough for the Chinese government to blacklist her as "dishonest". 

Think about it. China's system started with similar business models found in Alibaba and Tencent

In the United States the databases, digital surveillance, national credit score system, systems of reward and punishment, government-knows-best attitude, electronic purchasing data and ubiquitous social media networks already exist. America has Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon that all monitor what you read, see, say, search and buy.  One's android or iPhone already tracks everyone who uses such devices hundreds of times daily. And that information is already being used for complete censorship in America. 

The threat of internet censorship at the national and global level is real, especially since Obama surrendered control over key internet infrastructure to globalist "stakeholders" unimpeded by the United States’ Constitutional First Amendment protecting Free Speech; and, with the United Nations actively campaigning for censorship worldwide, Internet Freedom has never been in more grave peril. If the Orwellian trend continues, it will only be a matter of a few years before the world-wide internet web, even in America, famous and admired around the world for Her absolutist free speech protections and rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, will be facing full-blown and outright censorship at the hands of a rogue alliance of governments, dictators, international institutions, and their Big Business cronies.

For decades now, America has suffered Her Marxist and multicultural FOOLS and all the debilitating thought processes that accompany them. They deny objective Truth, in their advocacy of relativism, that views ethics and morals as relative to the individual and his culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil -- no such thing as Right and Wrong. Facts no longer exist for these Communist FOOLS, only feelings and interpretations and the crime of offending someone. Heaven forbid anyone is offended in today's politically correct world. 

Through cultural relativism our children in America are taught to hate our past use of slavery and its inherent racist code, but they are not allowed to learn about or criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and even the dark recesses of some of America's own neighborhoods in New York and Dearborn, Michigan and New Mexico and elsewhere. They are taught we must accept a multicultural society where diversity is thought to be a virtue, even as it erodes the very fabric of our society and births massive segments of anti-American populations as viewed in modern day Minneapolis and the hundreds of thousands of Somalian Muslims who 'til this very day give more allegiance to Islam and ISIS than they do America -- even as it moves the nation towards a rebuilding of the land of Babble, with multiple codes of law, including Sharia Law and the harshest codes on earth, creating an immoral plane that forbids contrary behaviors to anything the government decrees legal, whether it is polygamy, homosexual unions, transgender fluidity and gender equality. At every turn, all the good and decent morals and virtues and principles that made America so EXCEPTIONAL will be ridiculed, defamed, trashed and ultimately abrogated and destroyed. [Blog Editor: A great academic critique of cultural relativism: Critiquing Cultural Relativism; By Jaret Kanarek; The Intellectual Standard, PDF Volume 2 | Issue 2 - Article 1; 2013]

Each day something seems to offend someone in America because it is deemed "racist" or "culturally insensitive". And this is enough to move to have the offender removed from the public square, to be banished for an indeterminate period, sometimes forever. 

These erroneous societal movements are only serving the further destruction of the nation, just as demanded by the agendas of the communists, socialists, Muslims, globalists and proponents of the New World Order. Allowing the fallacies of social justice theory that reveal a world of oppressors and victims only ensures America's demise. Males are shown as oppressors and females are victims; whites are oppressors and people of color are victims; heterosexuals [h]ate oppressors and homosexuals and transgendered are victims; Christians are oppressors and Muslims are victims. Teaching our sons and daughters this BULLS**T simply ensures the nation descends into its own particular brand of HELL designed and facilitated by the enemies from within, the enemies of America and the enemies of Liberty.

Recently, Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been marked as too controversial to be read in America's schools, due to the use of racial slurs by the book's bad guys, which delivered properly would serve as a good lesson against racism. But educators want us to raise a nation of wimps, so we must avoid "(causing) students to feel upset" at all costs. 

'Mary Poppins' and 'The Lion King' are both apparently too racist to place before any student. The New York Times accuses Mary Poppins of "shamelessly flirting" with blackface because she has soot on her face, while dancing in the 1964 movie adaption of the book. The Lion King is demeaned as "racist" because Africa is supposedly "depicted as one big animal reserve" and no human characters are shown. 

Even the once esteemed University of Notre Dame has jumped on the Communist politically correct bandwagon, as it seeks to further the Democratic Party Communist agenda and attack our American Heritage for America's sins of the past, just one more move to coddle overly-sensitive students. As the university covered its murals of Christopher Columbus, due to his alleged "atrocities against the native people" and his discovery of America that "sparked centuries of transatlantic colonization", Notre Dame president John Jenkins said that the murals were "demeaning" to the "indigenous peoples." Outraged students called this a decision to "coddle (Notre Dame's) students by shielding them from a painting of an important figure in world history." 

According to the New Communist, the Western World and the principles of freedom and liberty it birthed, especially America's society, are societies filled with evil and responsible for all the evil in the wider world. British imperialism is blamed for the specific foibles and problems associated with what are in fact indigenous cultural norms, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, the corruption and backwardness found in former colonies of European powers and America are blamed on Western imperialism. No matter the great acts of sacrifice the American people have committed to save entire sections of the world, our nation remains the focus of anti-imperialism and a target of people and groups who at this very moment seek Her destruction. 

The New Communists present America's sins as something unique to the United States of America. They conveniently ignore contemporary empires, such as the Arab Islamic Empire that conquered all of the Middle East, North Africa, southern Europe, Persia, Central Asia and northern India, occupying them minimally for hundreds of years -- occupying the Middle East and North Africa for 1400 years and still to this day. The New Communists also conveniently ignore the ethnic cleansing committed by the Han Chinese under the Communists, when they invaded Inner Mongolia to the north, Chinese Turkestan to the west and Tibet to the south. 

Today, even more surreal and astounding, the United Nations is even demanding censorship in America. Following the violence in Charlottesville, the UN released a torrential flood of press releases, statements, warnings and condemnations that demanded action from the U.S. government against "hate speech", even though "hate speech" is founded on a bogus Marxist narrative utilized by the apparatchiks and the Cheka of the mass-murdering hate regime enslaving the Soviet Union to ban speech they did not like. Aside from this, the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits any government restrictions on speech, hateful or otherwise; however, if one needs any more evidence of the existential threat looming over the entire Free World and the stark danger at hand, take a quick look at Europe, where pastors are literally thrown in jail for defending their testimony as a Christian and spreading the Gospel and the "crime" of offending any nearby Muslim and where politicians are arrested for quoting Winston Churchill's assessment of Islam, and the facts are sufficient to firmly and convincingly drive the point home.

[Three Examples:

o    UK: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison for "Grossly Offending" Islam; By Soeren Kern; Gatestone Institute; 6/28/15 5:00 am



All good and decent American Patriots -- conservatives, Christians, libertarians and all others who love freedom and liberty -- must realize that the Orwellian nightmare enforced by private hands is just as harmful to human freedom as if the dystopia was enforced by the hands of Soviet-style commissars. The results are the same. Freedom of expression is being sacrificed to the God of political correctness. In a world where digital lynch mobs can ruin people's entire lives -- harming their reputations, as was done to Alex Jones and his 'InfoWars' network and later to Roger Stone, making it impossible to feed their families and potentially subjecting them to retaliatory violence, as seen in the attacks on Trump supporters wearing "MAGA" caps --  for merely expressing an honest opinion amounts to an extremely dark age for liberty.

Life sure isn't going to get any easier for any of Us, not if the red, radical Democratic Party Communist rat bastards have their way about it, as they continue with their politically correct pushes, their internet controls, their postmodern relativism and their multiculturalism that attacks the truth of any issue on any given day, and all of this is done in the name of equality, freedom and social justice; in truth, it is a propagandists' movement focused on ending freedom and liberty in Our Beloved America, the exact opposite of the things they purport to support.

Big Brother is now moving to become judge, jury and executioner, and this does not bode well for the average person in America, or anywhere else in the world, except for the small handful of global oligarchs and so-called "elites". All Americans must stand together in order to defeat this ever burgeoning Orwellian surveillance Deep State, before all of our Liberty and our God-given Rights are lost and suppressed forever.

Fight for the Freedom of All. Fight for Our God-Given Rights. Fight for LIBERTY.

By Justin O. Smith
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Edited by John R. Houk
Text enclosed by brackets and source links are by the Editor.

© Justin O. Smith


Monday, December 19, 2016

The Radical Jesus: How Would the Baby in a Manger Fare in the American Police State?


You may have heard of “WWJD”. Which is an acronym for “What Would Jesus Do?” This interesting kind-of Christmas essay from John W. Whitehead might create a new acronym: How Would You Support Jesus in a Police State? (Perhaps HWYSJPS?)

The baby Jesus grew up in a no-tech yet harsh Roman police state. Whitehead speculates on the challenges Jesus would face in a high-tech police state. The overregulated police state that America has evolved toward, especially under the guise of America’s Leftist control. (But Whitehead takes a few stabs at issues Conservatives might be supportive of as well.)

JRH 12/19/16
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The Radical Jesus: How Would the Baby in a Manger Fare in the American Police State?

By John W. Whitehead
Sent December 19, 2016 8:03 AM

“Jesus is too much for us. The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from ‘extremism.’”—author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant

Jesus was good. He was caring. He had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. He went around helping the poor. And when confronted by those in authority, he did not shy away from speaking truth to power.

Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state.

But what if Jesus, the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet, had been born 2,000 years later? How would Jesus’ life have been different had he be born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy. That boy, Jesus, would grow up to undermine the political and religious establishment of his day and was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

However, had Jesus been born in the year 2016

Rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had his parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Either way, whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state. Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what Jesus and other activists suffered in their day is happening to those who choose to speak truth to power today.

Thus, we are faced with a choice: remain silent in the face of evil or speak out against it. As Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus proclaimed:

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

WC: 1495

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ABOUT JOHN WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.orgClick here to read more of John Whitehead's commentaries.

Copyright © 2016 The Rutherford Institute, All rights reserved.


PUBLICATION GUIDELINES AND REPRINT PERMISSION

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

[Blog Editor: I have not received permission to cross post this on my blog. Ergo, if asked to remove the post I will comply. If you wish to cross post you should get permission avoid grief.]

About The Rutherford Institute

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization based in Charlottesville, Va., is deeply committed to protecting the constitutional freedoms of every American and the integral human rights of all people through its extensive legal and educational programs. The Institute provides its legal services at no charge to those whose constitutional and human rights have been threatened or violated.

Founded in 1982 by constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute is one of the nation's leading advocates of civil liberties and human rights, litigating in the courts and educating the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting individual freedom in the United States and around the world.

The Institute’s mission is twofold: to provide legal services in the defense of civil liberties and to educate the public on important issues affecting their constitutional freedoms.

Whether our attorneys are protecting the rights of READ THE REST


Wednesday, June 12, 2013

How to Keep Your Info Private (Even From the NSA)

Uncle Sam- who says govt doesn't listen toon

The NSA is spying unconstitutionally against Americans! I am outraged, are you? There are tech measures to take to try an end run around NSA snooping until either Congress or Supreme Court set things Constitutionally right.
 
The article I read concerning these counter measures claims the terrorists of the world already know them. That makes sense to me; however I am guessing in this age of super-secret technology that the NSA has counter measures for the counter measures.
 
Anyway if you wish to throw a monkey wrench into the Big Brother U.S. government spying on you unconstitutionally read the article and see what you can do. I myself have little to hide and so I am not inclined to find the funds to have to fool my government about my private life. On the other hand if Big Brother starts to politically persecute little insignificant me who is not a mover and shaker, then I might change my mind and make greater efforts to guard my privacy against Big Brother.
 
JRH 6/12/13 (Hat Tip: Vicki)
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How to Keep Your Info Private (Even From the NSA)
 
June 10, 2013 4:30 AM
 
Thwarting the efforts of a billion-dollar super-secret government spy agency -- or anyone else who wants access to your personal information -- is not that difficult.
 
With the recent revelations that the NSA and other agencies have been tapping into corporate streams of data that can provide them with massive amounts of private information about U.S. citizens, now is a good time to start thinking about how best to keep your private information private.
 
Not a big deal, you say? Well, whether you’re concerned about the government digging through your personal data or not, you should be concerned about protecting your privacy. According to the Department of Justice’s most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, “In 2010, 7 percent of households in the United States, or about 8.6 million households, had at least one member age 12 or older who experienced one or more types of identity theft victimization.” That’s almost one in 10, with 76 percent of them experiencing direct financial loss as a result.
 
Imagine that statistic was for bank robberies or home break-ins. If 1 in 10 Americans had their bank accounts emptied or their home broken into, we’d all be living in fear. And yet, that’s happening every year to our personal information. Making that information harder for someone else to obtain is Step One in preventing identity theft.
 
And not all identity theft is of the “crime” variety. There’s a famous quote that I’m paraphrasing: “If you’re using a website and you can’t figure out what they’re selling, you’re what they’re selling.”
 
Many corporations make a living off of selling or processing your personal habits and preferences for marketers, retailers and government agencies, practically without your knowledge. Since you’re not being paid for this information, and (unless you speak legalese and love spending your afternoons reading “Terms and Conditions”) you’re not aware that it’s being taken and used in this fashion, I’d consider it “theft.” But since the government has yet to agree with me, the best way to prevent yourself being used in this fashion is to get a little more serious about your privacy.
 
In this article, we’ll focus on the things the NSA has reportedly been looking at. It’s reasonable to assume that if you can stop them from taking a peek at your private information, you’ll have stopped hackers and others, too. Fortunately, thwarting the efforts of a billion-dollar super-secret government spy agency is not that difficult. You just need to know which services to turn to.
 
It’s important to note that everything in this article is public knowledge. If you’re worried about terrorists reading it and figuring out how to thwart our government’s best efforts at finding them, don’t be. The terrorists already know this stuff. You, however, might not
.
1. Your phone
 
If you’re looking to keep SMS messages secure and you have an iPhone, there’s a free app called Wickr that can help. The app uses end-to-end encryption without storing the keys for decryption on its servers. What that means is that when you send a message to someone else using Wickr, nothing you say can be read by anyone at Wickr. Because of that, there’s no stream of plain text messages going back and forth that the NSA or anyone else can siphon.
 
To make voice calls, the easiest option is Silent Circle, but you’re going to have to pay for the privilege — $20 to $29 per month to call other Silent Circle users, with an optional add-on to safeguard calls to everyone else. Joining Silent Circle also gets you secure chat, email and video calling.
 
If you’re an Android user, you have a few more options than iPhone users do. For text messages, there’s Gibberbot. Like Wickr, Gibberbot is free and promises more secure messaging.
 
And for calls, check out RedPhone. When calling someone who also has RedPhone, everything you say is encrypted, making it much more difficult for someone to listen in. Plus, it’s free and uses your data connection, not your cellular voice. So not only will your calls be secure, you won’t have to pay for the minutes either.
 
 
More Android apps to check out:
 
·         TextSecure (chat).
 
 
·         Kryptos (chat).
 
2. Your Dropbox
 
According to documents released by The Guardian and The Washington Post, Dropbox is “coming soon” to the NSA’s spy program. If that were to happen, documents, tax records or other private information in your Dropbox folder could be subject to government monitoring. Add to that Dropbox suffering security breaches in the past, and they’re just not safe enough for me. The solution? SpiderOak.
 
SpiderOak is just like Dropbox — there’s a folder, you put stuff in it, that folder syncs between computers and devices — but with one important difference: good encryption. Everything you put in your SpiderOak Hive (that’s what they call their syncing folder) is first encrypted on your computer using your password, then sent to the SpiderOak servers.
 
This means that even SpiderOak can’t read your data without your password; it looks like gibberish. So if someone (the NSA, a foreign government, or a hacker in Latvia) manages to get into SpiderOak’s servers, they won’t be able to see what you’ve stored there without breaking one of the world’s most advanced encryption algorithms (one the NSA trusts to secure its own data).
 
But SpiderOak can also back up any file or folder on your computer, sync any file or folder on your computer, and share any file or folder on your computer. This makes it a great one-stop-shop for all your syncing, sharing and backup needs.
 
There’s a free plan that offers 2 GB of data, plenty for storing tax returns, scans of important documents, photos, small videos, and other data that you would prefer was stored securely. If you need more space, they offer it for a fee. Prices are almost identical to Dropbox, starting at $10 for 100 GB.
 
3. Your social network
 
Unfortunately, there’s no good option here. You join social networks because you want to share things with others, or connect with people you know and see what they’re sharing. Typically, this includes things that you might use as password reset reminders on other sites: a pet’s name, your mother’s name, high school you attended, favorite sports team, etc. That means that if a hacker or the NSA can gain access to your social media profile (either directly with your password, or indirectly by pretending to be someone you know and friending you), they can probably find enough information to gain access to your accounts on other sites, as well.
 
While there are a few start-up social networks that offer more advanced encryption of your data, they’re complicated to install, and even more difficult to get everyone you know using them, too. For now, the best option is to assume that anything you post on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., will eventually be read by everyone in the world. That way, it won’t matter much if someone gets access to your data, be that a government agency, a jilted ex-girlfriend, or simply a prospective or current employer.
 
To share more securely, use something like SpiderOak or a secure messaging program to share directly with those you trust.
 
4. Your credit cards
 
Yes, the NSA is probably looking at credit card transactions, too. So how do you get around exposing your purchase history? “I already know this; the answer is to use cash,” you’re probably thinking. But how do you shop online without using a credit card?
 
The answer, sort of, is Bitcoin. It’s a virtual currency (you give or receive Bitcoins, which are worth something in dollars), but if used correctly, it can provide almost complete anonymity when shopping online. And since you’re not typing your credit card information into a site that may or may not keep that data secure, there’s no risk that your account will be stolen by someone hacking the site.
 
The only catch is that there aren’t a lot of places that accept Bitcoins. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find ones that do. But if the currency takes off, it could become the “cash” of the Internet.
 
A more doable option? Buy prepaid gift cards from Visa, MasterCard or American Express with cash. Then use those to shop online. You’ll probably have to pay a few dollars extra when buying the card, but afterward you’ll be able to shop anywhere those cards are accepted without having the purchase data and your identification forwarded to a government agency. If the site where you used the card is ever hacked, you’ve got nothing to worry; by that time you’ll probably have already used the balance on the card and moved on to one with a different number.
 
5. Your Web history
 
Everything you search for on Google, and a good deal of your browsing activity, can also be snooped on by the NSA, according to news reports. The problem is your IP address. It’s the sequence of numbers that identifies your computer on the Internet, and can be traced back to you through your ISP (Internet service provider).
 
The answer? A virtual private network, or VPN. A VPN will sit between you and the websites you visit, encrypting and relaying information back and forth. So when you do a search on Google, the IP address Google records as having performed the search is that of the VPN, not you. Find a good VPN, one that’s easy to use, with a good price, limited or no logging of your activity and fast speed, and you’ll be much harder to track online. Just make sure you sign out of your Google, Facebook, and Twitter accounts before connecting to the VPN, or use your web browser’s private mode.
 
Here’s a list of VPNs to consider. If you just want me to pick one for you, check out IPVanish.com. They have software that makes them especially easy to use, can be set up on your computer, tablet or smartphone, have servers all over the world that you can connect to, and cost $10 for unlimited use (and it’s even cheaper if you pay for a year in advance).
 
Bonus: Some VPNs accept Bitcoin as payment, making for the ultimate in anonymous Web browsing. Not even the VPN has to know who you are.
While using a VPN at home is something you might consider to protect your privacy from the NSA, using a VPN at a public Wi-Fi hot spot or hotel network should be mandatory. Often, those networks are unsecured and almost everything you do can be “sniffed” out of the air by someone else connected to the same network. A VPN would protect you.
 
6. Your everything else
 
While I’ve tried to hit all the major areas you might want to protect, this is by no means a comprehensive list of everything you can do to keep your private information safe and secure. Entire websites could be devoted to the topic.
 
Websites like Security In-A-Box. They’ll teach you everything from creating good passwords and protecting your computer from hackers to remaining anonymous online and bypassing censorship. And it’s free. If you’re interested in protecting your data in this brave new world, I encourage you to check it out.
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© 2013 Money Talks News. All Rights Reserved.
 
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