Duncan Campbell
There are some simple things you can do to guard your privacy online.
These include:
l Avoid Web-based e-mail services. They use standard browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape. For new users, they can seem an easier start, but they are easier to break into. For better security, select an ordinary service provider which provides a standard e-mail service with a separate e- mail programme.
l The most commonly used encryption programme is Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) at www.pgpi.org. It’s free to private users, runs on most common operating systems, and will integrate itself seamlessly into popular e-mail programmes such as Eudora or Outlook Express. Once a message is written, PGP scrambles it using the published “public key” of the intended recipient. Only that person can then read the message when it arrives; to anyone else it’s a meaningless jumble of letters. To start using PGP, you create your own pair of keys: one for encrypting and the other for decrypting. Publicise the encrypting key to the people you correspond with, or to the world generally, and your mail can be sent scrambled.
Security experts can steal PGP information but for most people who simply want an electronic envelope around their personal mail, PGP is a sufficient solution.
l Hushmail: the name is a play on the Hotmail service. But mail sent to and from Hushmail’s free Web service (www.hushmail.com) is automatically encrypted as it arrives. While stored on the Hushmail Web server, it is unreadable. So even if Hushmail’s computers were as vulnerable as Hotmail’s, there would be nothing intelligible for an intruder to see and understand. But e-mail could still be read on its way into Hushmail, unless separately encrypted.
l Freedom: designed by Zero Knowledge Systems (which can be found at www.zeroknowledge.com), this is a new kind of Internet service.
Its Canadian designers were concerned that privacy didn’t begin and end with the contents of e-mail messages. They wanted to protect Net users from all kinds of surveillance, such as snooping on what websites they visited.
Freedom stops that not just by encrypting messages but by turning everyone’s identity into digital pseudonyms. Different pseudonyms allow you to separately explore completely different areas of the Internet and avoid being profiled by Internet marketers. They claim that no one – not even Zero-Knowledge Systems – will be able to find out who is behind a digital identity.
l Because the whole of the next century’s e-commerce will depend on encryption methods for security and identification, cryptography is now essential at the heart of every computer.
Microsoft has created a standard program for doing this, CAPI. But you can’t have the high-security version of CAPI unless you are in North America.
For everyone else, loopholes and low security are built-in features, to help United Staters intelligence agencies gather information.
The problem is that when loopholes are built in for companies, law or intelligence agencies to exploit, other people find them.
ENDS