Despite the cancellation of Snowden's first public appearance in Russia, his advice on maintaining privacy on the Internet is becoming more relevant every day. Life has collected recommendations from the most famous former US intelligence officer on how to protect yourself on the Internet.

1. Encryption of voice calls and text messages. Snowden is an absolute proponent of encrypting all content stored and transmitted. Nowadays there are many applications that have encryption functions. Moreover, among them there are common and well-known instant messengers, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, ICQ. By the way, the most popular - WhatsApp - introduced full end-to-end encryption in April 2016.

Snowden himself calls Signal his favorite messenger for communication (available for iOS and Android), which, as he wrote on Twitter, he uses every day. The application is being developed by Open Whisper Systems, which also offers call encryption.

2. Hard drive encryption. In addition to securing your mobile devices, the former CIA agent also advises securing your computer, particularly your hard drive. You can find instructions on how to do this on the Internet. Usually special software is used. For example, for Windows there is a program preinstalled in extended versions of the OS - BitLocker, for Mac - FileVault. This way, if your computer is stolen, an attacker will not be able to read your data.

3. Password managers. A useful thing that most people don't even think about. Such programs allow you to keep your passwords in order - create unique keys and store them. According to Snowden, one of the most common problems of online privacy is leaks: for example, a service for which a user registered in 2007 was attacked and data leaked to the Internet - just remember the recent reports about the sale of millions of passwords from accounts on Twitter. , “VKontakte”, MySpace, LinkedIn. There are different password managers in the market such as 1Password, KeePassX and LastPass.

4. Two-factor authentication. Security words, previously offered on large services and allowing you to recover a password using them, are becoming a thing of the past. Now all popular online platforms - Facebook, VKontakte, email clients, Twitter, Dropbox - have switched to two-step authentication. It allows you to link a phone number to your account, which will be used for additional authorization when logging into your account. It will also help you recover your lost password. True, you will have to “light up” your mobile phone, which makes it possible to identify you with the specified number (as Facebook does, for example, allowing you to find a user by his phone number).

5. Tor. The anonymous network Tor (abbr. The Onion Router) is called by a former NSA employee “the most important technological project for ensuring privacy currently in use.” He stated that he uses it on a daily basis. Tor allows you to “cover your tracks” on the Internet, that is, it provides anonymity and makes it difficult to determine a person’s IP address and location. This is accomplished by connecting through a chain of intermediate computers belonging to different Internet users. The project is supported entirely by volunteers. The easiest way to use the system is through the browser of the same name (Tor Browser).

6. And once again about passwords. Snowden advises using not words like onetwothreefour (“onetwothreefour”) or even password (“password”) as a key to an account, but something more intricate that even a computer cannot pick up, but at the same time memorable - margaretthatcheris110%SEXY (“MargaretthatcherSEXUALNA110%”) ").

For the specially paranoid

In the video below, a former NSA agent demonstrated to a journalist how to avoid total surveillance by intelligence agencies, which can remotely turn on the microphone or camera on a smartphone and start listening. The answer is simple - remove the microphone and camera modules from the device. Instead, it is proposed to use an external accessory and wean yourself from selfies.

In 1993, The New Yorker magazine published a famous cartoon about a dog using a computer. “No one on the Internet knows you’re a dog,” the caption said. More than twenty years later, things are exactly the opposite. On today's Internet, any dog ​​knows who you are - and sometimes even better than you do.

The Internet doesn't do well with secrets, and privacy is no exception. Every click made in the browser, by definition, must be known to two parties: the client and the server. This is the best case scenario. In fact, where there are two, there are three, or even, if we take the Hacker website as an example, all twenty-eight.

For example

To verify this, just enable the developer tools built into Chrome or Firefox. More than half of these requests have nothing to do with documents located on the “Hacker” servers. Instead, they lead to 27 different domains owned by several foreign companies. It is these requests that eat up 90% of the time when loading a site.

What are these domains? Advertising networks, several web analytics systems, social networks, a payment service, the Amazon cloud and a couple of marketing widgets. A similar set, and often even more extensive, is available on any commercial site. Not only we know about them (this goes without saying), but also the owners of these 27 domains.

Many of them don't just know. They are watching you with the most intense interest. Do you see the banner? It is loaded from the server of Doubleclick, a large advertising network that is owned by Google. If the banner were not there, it would have found another way. The same data can be retrieved using the Google Analytics tracker or through AdSense, by accessing fonts from Google Fonts or jQuery on the Google CDN. At least some clue can be found on a significant proportion of pages on the Internet.

Analyzing the history of a user’s movements on the Internet helps Google determine with good accuracy his interests, gender, age, income, marital status and even health status. This is necessary in order to select advertisements more accurately. Even a small increase in targeting accuracy at the scale of Google is worth billions of dollars, but other applications are possible. According to documents published by Edward Snowden, American and British intelligence agencies intercepted Google trackers to identify suspects.

You are being watched - this is a fact that you need to come to terms with. It's better to focus on other issues. How do they do it? Is it possible to hide from surveillance? And is it worth it?

Find and hide

In order to follow a person, you need to be able to identify him. The simplest and most well-studied identification method is a cookie. The problem is that it is most vulnerable to attacks from privacy advocates. Both users and even politicians know about them. In the European Union, for example, there is a law that forces sites to warn users about the dangers of cookies. It makes no sense, but the fact itself is alarming.

Another problem is that some browsers, by default, block cookies set by a third party - such as a web analytics service or advertising network. This limitation can be circumvented by sending the user through a chain of redirects to a third-party server and back, but this, firstly, is not very convenient, and secondly, it is unlikely to save anyone in the long term. Sooner or later a more reliable identification method will be required.

There are many more places in the browser where you can hide identification information than the developers intended. It just takes some ingenuity. For example, through the DOM property window.name, you can transfer up to two megabytes of data to other pages, and unlike cookies, which are only accessible to scripts from the same domain, data in window.name is also available from other domains. The only thing that prevents us from replacing cookies with window.name is the ephemerality of this property. It does not retain its value after the session ends.

A few years ago, it became fashionable to store identity information using so-called Local Shared Objects (LSOs), which Flash provides. Two factors played in LSO's favor. Firstly, unlike cookies, the user could not delete them using the browser. Secondly, if each browser has its own cookies, then LSO, like Flash itself, is the same for all browsers on a computer. Due to this, it is possible to identify a user who alternately works in different browsers.

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Today we will talk about what data the provider stores about the user, as well as in general about what he can know and what he cannot. For example, can you see what sites you visit? And why does the provider monitor users?

In general, with providers, not everything is so simple, they are required by law to listen to user traffic - are they breaking the law, what are they doing there, of course they don’t look, but they record basic data, people don’t check them for no reason (that is, it’s all recorded automatically mode).

• If a user opens a certain website, is this visible to the provider? Yes, in most cases it is the domain name that is visible, rarely just the IP address. The time you visited the site is also recorded. Website content is also visible
• What if I access the site using the secure https protocol? Then the provider sees only the name of the site or its IP address and that’s it, he doesn’t see the content, since https is a secure connection with encryption, which is why it is recommended to use it.
• How can the provider detect that I downloaded a movie or program via torrent? The thing is that the torrent downloader communicates with the torrent tracker via the HTTP protocol, so the provider can see everything that you downloaded (simply by analyzing the page from which the torrent file was downloaded) and when (started/finished). It is also possible to connect via HTTPS, but for some reason even the largest torrent in the CIS does not support such a protocol, but why is a mystery.
• Does the provider save everything I download? No, this is simply physically impossible; no hard drives would be enough. Traffic is processed on the fly, sorted and statistics are kept, which is what has been stored for years.
• Can the provider find out that I downloaded a .torrent file? Yes, maybe this is exactly what they are trying to monitor - the interaction between the torrent client and the server; they cannot analyze traffic within the torrent network, because it is very, very expensive.
• And if I use a VPN, the provider doesn’t see anything? Here the thing is that with a VPN, yes, the provider sees a mess - that is, encrypted data and will not analyze it, much less decrypt it, because it is almost impossible. But it can find out from IP servers that this is a VPN specifically for encrypting traffic. This means that the user has something to hide, draw your own conclusions
• If I use OpenVPN, will all programs work through it, including Windows updates? In theory, yes, and in general it should be so. But in practice it all depends on the settings.
• Can my provider find out the real IP address of a certain site if I access it via VPN? Actually, no, but there is another point. If suddenly the VPN stops working, or if there is some kind of error, then Windows will simply start working as usual, that is, without using a VPN - just directly. To fix this, firstly, you need to configure OpenVPN itself, and secondly, use an additional firewall (I recommend Outpost Firewall), in which you can create global traffic rules.
• That is, if the VPN glitches, the provider will see what site I’m on? Unfortunately, yes, everything will be recorded automatically.
• Can TOR provide anonymity? Maybe, but it is advisable to configure it a little to use IP addresses for all except the CIS, and also for the addresses to change more often, for example every three minutes. Also, for better effect, I advise you to use repeaters (bridges).
• What does the provider see when I receive packets from constantly different IP addresses? ISPs have a system for detecting the use of TOR, but I'm not sure if this system works with relays. The fact of using TOR is also recorded and also tells the provider that this user may be hiding something
• Does the ISP see the site address via Tor or VPN? No, only the VPN IP address or Tor exit node.
• Is the full name of the address visible to the provider when using the HTTPS protocol? No, you can only see the domain address (that is, only site.com), connection time and transferred volume. But this data is not particularly useful for the provider in terms of information. If you use HTTP, then you can see everything that is transmitted - both the full address and everything that you wrote/sent in a message by mail, for example, but again, this does not apply to Gmail - the traffic there is encrypted.
• That is, if I use encryption of the connection, then I can already be on the list of suspects? No, not really. On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, data encryption or even global encryption of the entire network can be used not only by some hackers or users, but also by simple organizations that are concerned about the secure transmission of data, which is logical, especially in the banking industry.
• Does the provider see the fact that I2P is being used? It does, but so far this type of network is not as familiar to providers as, for example, Tor, which, due to its popularity, is attracting more and more attention from intelligence agencies. The I2P provider sees the I2P traffic as encrypted connections to different IP addresses, which indicates that the client is working with a P2P network.
• How do I know if I am under SORM? This abbreviation stands for “System of technical capabilities for operational-search activities.” And if you are connected to the Internet in the Russian Federation, then you are already under surveillance by default. Moreover, this system is completely official and traffic must pass through it, otherwise Internet providers and telecom operators will simply have their license revoked.
• How to see all the traffic on your computer the way providers see it? A traffic sniffing utility will help you with this; the best of its kind is the Wireshark analyzer.
• Is it possible to somehow understand that you are being followed? Today, almost none, sometimes, perhaps with an active attack like MitM (Man in the middle). If passive surveillance is used, then it is technically impossible to detect it.
• But what to do then, is it possible to somehow make surveillance more difficult? You can divide the Internet, that is, your connection to it, into two parts. Sit on social networks, on dating sites, watch entertainment sites, movies, do it all over a regular connection. Use an encrypted connection separately and in parallel - for example, install a virtual machine for this. This way you will have a more or less natural environment, so to speak, because many sites encrypt traffic, Google in its services, and other large companies. But on the other hand, almost all entertainment sites do NOT encrypt traffic. That is, this is the norm - when the user has both open and encrypted traffic. It’s another matter when the provider sees that the user’s traffic is only encrypted; of course, questions may arise here.

Hope you found some useful answers

“If you are paranoid, this does not mean that you are not being watched...” - one well-known character used to say, and there really is a grain of truth in this. The information age has given us a lot, but in return our privacy has been threatened. Geolocation applications, social networks, Instagram, tracking services, viruses and many other spying tools are a direct threat to privacy and peace of mind.

So what should you do to protect yourself from unauthorized surveillance? You must find the answer to this question for yourself, because there are many on the Internet who will happily take advantage of your ignorance and carelessness.

There are quite a few protection recipes and almost all of them are quite simple. For greater convenience, we will consider options for stopping surveillance by type of equipment that can be used.

1. Geolocation services. Many mobile applications and desktop programs have functionality for determining the user’s location. You can disable detection of your computer's location directly in program settings or, alternatively, simply report inaccurate coordinates during the initial installation of new applications. For example, for Firefox there is a convenient Geolocater application that allows you to set coordinates yourself, and in the Chrome browser you should activate the developer tools and change the current geodata directly in the “Emulation” tab.
2. Camera. Filming and visual surveillance is one of the most dangerous and unpleasant types of unauthorized surveillance. And it doesn’t matter what you do at the computer, what you look like, what’s open on the screen and how the recordings can be used in the future - each of us always needs a feeling of security. If this is not the case, there is no peace. But this type of surveillance is very easy to control. It's very simple: cover the camera with a neat piece of dark tape. If necessary, it can be easily peeled off, but this is the only way to truly prevent possible information leakage. This approach is simple, but it is many times more effective than any programs and applications.
3. Microphone. Like the built-in camera, the microphone can collect a lot of information about the owner of the computer or smartphone, and the option with adhesive tape will not work here. Unlike the image, sound penetrates quite easily through a mechanical obstacle, so different protection is needed here. For almost every operating system, you can select an application that blocks access to the microphone for any installed programs: Windows owners should pay attention to Webcam Blocker Pro, and Micro Snitch and its analogues will be relevant for Mac. All programs work in the background, their work is invisible, but very effective.
4. Keyboard. To track data entered using the keyboard, nothing supernatural is needed, since there are currently dozens of small programs that easily implement this type of monitoring. How to prevent data leakage in this case? Firstly, you can use abbreviations or assign special key combinations to each of the entered passwords, secondly, in especially important cases, use an on-screen analogue of the keyboard, thirdly, regularly check your computer with antiviruses, without neglecting updates.

Modern technologies dictate new rules of behavior for us online and a more serious approach to personal data and information in general. Neglecting this means jeopardizing your material well-being, private life and career. Antiviruses, careful attention to information published online, and the protection measures described here will help reduce the likelihood of secret collection of information and make it possible to safely continue work, business, and online communication.

Fortunately, advanced technologies are in service not only with villains, but also with good people. The 3D scanning and printing industry is now in full swing. If you want to find out the latest news in this area, then I recommend that you attend a thematic conference. You can find out about the conference on the website 3dprintconf.ru. In the IT field, everything happens so quickly that if you hesitate a little, you will fall out of the mainstream. To prevent this from happening, educate yourself.

Video.
Continuing the topic, I suggest watching a simple but practical video on the topic of how to get rid of surveillance on the Internet.