“Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground”

That’s what Snowden said in a Guardian article this week.

The UK, US, and Australia are all actively working to undermine our encryption by forcing back doors and fatal flaws into the encryption that we all use. The Snowden revelations exposed that governments are actively undermining online privacy, and have already cracked many forms of encryption. Australia has basically banned end-to-end encryption, and the white house is talking about it. Governments are forcing private companies to undermine their own encryption.

"This renders all of our public infrastructure and private lives permanently unsafe." says Snowden. It is something we cannot allow.

I explain how VPNs can help give us back online privacy, how they work, which kinds have already been cracked by the NSA and which still seem effective, and what to look for in a good VPN.

Keep in mind, VPNs are not anonymous and are not a fool proof method for privacy. Jeremy Campbell, creator of DNSleaktest.com, said: "Using public VPNs for anonymity is foolish and potentially dangerous, no matter how securely it’s configured, simply because the technology was not designed at all for anonymity. VPN services require that you trust them, which is a property that anonymity systems do not have.”

How safe is your VPN, really?

Guardian article from Snowden:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/encryption-lose-privacy-us-uk-australia-facebook

Suggestions from Freedom Of The Press:

https://freedom.press/training/choosing-a-vpn/

Recommended VPN specs:

Authentication SHA256

Handshake RSA 4096 or at least RSA 2048

Data Encryption AES-256-GCM or AES-256-CBC

Great articles talking about Snowden revelations and encryption:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-the-nsa-can-break-trillions-of-encrypted-web-and-vpn-connections/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/nsa-has-vpns-in-vulcan-death-grip-no-really-thats-what-they-call-it/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/aiming-for-anonymity-ars-assesses-the-state-of-vpns-in-2016/

Recommended Books:

Permanent Record - Edward Snowden

https://amzn.to/305negc

Video: https://youtu.be/_xidFAksUtg