With ever more Supreme Court fuckery going on I’d like to help comrades in my local org be better secured against potential breaches.
Ideally I’d like to recommend 1-3 options that meet these needs:
- Easy to use
- Can be used on phones as well as mobile devices
- Doesn’t retain any network traffic data
Any ideas on what options we have?
You’re asking the wrong question. VPNs are cool and all, it won’t really protect your communication, especially not from a government actor. A VPN can sort of trick a website into thinking you are at a different location and in some ways can mask what you are doing from your ISP. It won’t protect you from the government.
What you want is GPG encryption of your communications. GPG can be used in 2 main ways, you can encrypt files/text or you can sign files/text. Each person has a private key and a public key. In the case where you encrypt a message, you would take the public key of the person that you want to receive the message to encrypt the message and then the encrypted message can only be decrypted by the recipients private key. In the case where you sign a message, you use your private key to generate a “signature” string and then other people can take your public key and the signature to confirm that you wrote the message that you signed.
You can set this up with an email client like Thunderbird (equivalent to firefox).
Great points! Would be good to also get everyone on the same e2ee messenger app, like Signal.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html
matrix is almost certainly more secure, although not without its own problems
I wouldn’t call matrix more secure. The amount of metadata it leaks can be enough to get you arrested or killed. It’s objectively better when communicating with unknown people and better for groups but I’m not sure it’s a better replacement for SMS. The CIA funding isn’t a nail in the coffin because the US government has a vested interest in keeping operatives safe with non-incriminating technology, such as tor.
fair enough, for sure use case should be considered with this stuff and signal is probably “good enough” for most people who aren’t actively planning to overthrow the government/do terrorism or whatever