Keeping yourself off of the Radar of the NSA. Only fiction? Part 1

What if I tell you that it is almost (if not) impossible to keep yourself out of the Big Brother's radar?  What if I told you that even though you take the most paranoid precautions, you are still caught on the net along with the other fishes? What if I told you that everything you have found out, everything you know about keeping yourself more secure is totally useless and you are hopeless when it comes to keep your data and digital prints safe? Well, let's dive into some facts....

I have published last year a Blog in how to keep yourself more secure on the net and in the physical ("real") life.  You should know that by the time I have published that Blog with solutions in how to better your privacy, more than a few Snowden's revelations have been surfaced even into the most naive people's eyes. The first thing you should know is that this is a mouse and cat game. This means that when the cat (the NSA for example) is trying to find new ways to push surveillance and autonomous systems to keep track of every single move we do, the mouse (freedom fighters and originalists) are sneakly moving forward finding new ways to keep their privacy a little more... private.

Edward Snowden who is now a refugee, along with the American journalist Glen Greenwald, had revealed some (not anymore) confidential U.S. Government files which pointed out the fact that we, as living beings in this world, are not free anymore.  Having a huge radar and a non-stoppable fierce, we have found out from the Citizenfour movie, that the U.S. is not the only "evil" on this game. Other countries, such as the U.K., Rusia, China, Germany, France, Sweden and Brazil (to name a few) are also joining this surveillance of humans' dystopia.

How everything got changed

In the last couple of years we have not only found out the "secret" surveillance programs and secret projects the NSA and its partners were (and still) using such as Carnivore, XKeyscore, PRISM, Muscular, Tempora and Project 6 (to only name a few).  We also now found out what I believe is the worse of the worst.

For now, the before-mentioned projects and programs work on a infrastructure level of networks (through spying big junks of data from big pipes) helped by Google, Facebook, Youtube, America Online, etc.  We all know how BIG Google is and how they also have access to most of the residential wireless passwords of the whole world via Android phones.  Also, through the Muscular program, we found out how the NSA is able to launch an exploit to any computer they want (regardless of the Operating System) in a matter of seconds. So, they have control over everyone's email, potential visited sites, potential personal information, habits (good and bad ones), data, metadata and every single piece of your life via Internet infrastructure and software. But this is enough for the NSA and its partners to have a total and perfectly shaped profile about their citizens, right? .. WRONG!!


Early last month, we have found out that China was putting Adware (Superfish) to Lenovo laptops by breaking and impersonating HTTPS certificates and also China was blamed for placing backdoors and surveillance software to routers in the past. Whether Superfish was software, now we are facing a new model.  Not only the NSA but also other governments are using hardware to spy on users inadvertently.  Earlier this month another Snowden revelation made a lot of people's jaws drop. This time, hiding "special, deletion-proof" spying software on the most common hard-drive brands, such as: Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba within others.  This poses a huge risk because now we do not and cannot trust not even our own brand new laptops.

Now that we know where we stand it is fair to ask ourselves: how can I protect myself? Is having a VPN, sitting behind 7 proxies or using TOR with a vast number of proxy-chains as well as using a live (read-only) USB drive running a live distro of Tails secure enough?

The Solution?


One thing we know. We know that this is a cat-mouse game and whoever knows more wins.  But this is not quite enough. Whoever is faster by staying up to date, develop the most (cryptographically) secure software as well as having a paranoid (security concious) attitude might be ahead of the game.


What about phones? As we know in the recent news, Gemalto encryption keys were stolen by the NSA and British Intelligence Communities and as we know cloning SIM cards in order to evade some tracking is illegal in most countries such as the U.S. and the U.K.  How can we protect against not only the big monsters of the digital information such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc? What about the exploits blindly launched by the NSA to our devices? We could have the best Firewalls and IDS/IPS but are they really enough against any Government which has the top cryptographic and evading software in the world?  What about defending against the spying hardware chipsets, hidden backdoors in our communication media such as routers and perhaps also Firewalls?  How can we also be safe against phone surveillance now that we know our SIM card data (or metadata) is being watched, analyzed and profiled?

The only thing I can think of is to be abstinent, and run a live copy of Tails. Remove your hard-drive, disable services (hardware and software) you don't need,  use and maintain your Firewalls, IDS and IPS, use TOR with Proxychains and of course, avoid doing anything stupid online.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%282013%E2%80%93present%29

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/16/nsa-computer-spying_n_6694736.html

http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-gemalto-sim-card-encryption-hack-key-questions/