Computer Counter Counter Measures

Even Ol' Bill of the Wobbly Speare apparently had issues with his abacus, as he wrote in MacBeth:

We still have judgement here,

that we but teach bloody instructions,

which, being taught,

returns to plague the inventor!

The main problem with the pervasive spying is that the spy agencies themselves are leaky sieves that share their data far and wide, so goodness knows where your data ends up. Next time you see a series of fraudulent transactions on your card statement, you now know who is to blame...

So, as Ol' Bill might wonder, how can thou protect thyself against the NSA and GCHQ overreach?

If you have a Dropbox (or insert your favourite cloud service) account and like to use it to share data between all your devices, then you can easily secure things using the cross platform Truecrypt available from here: http://www.truecrypt.org/

It works on Linux, Mac and Windoze and even has convenient apps for most mobiles.

Simply use Truecrypt to create an encrypted container of say 1GB in size inside your Dropbox directory.

Dropbox will then share the cypher text with your devices (and also the NSA, GCHQ, FSB and others), while Truecrypt will conveniently make the plain text available to you only.

The trick is not to make the encrypted container ridiculously large. 1GB is enough for most peaceful purposes.

Here is a sequence of screen shots of the process - easy:

To use it, you select the container using Truecrypt, type your password and Mount it - the default is NO NAME. You then open NO NAME with your file browser and click-drag-drop stuff to it, or edit files directly inside it. When you are done, you Unmount the container. That is all.

Dropbox will synchronize the container file as usual and you can then mount and use it on any device. Of course, you can also tell the password to someone else to exchange data securely.

Now you have no excuse not to share your data with all the spooks and mafiosi anymore!

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