Unhappy with the amount of data collection we KNOW the US government is doing, and assuming more is happening (or going to happen) I decided to move my private and company computing resources to secure places and environments. Not because I am a drug lord or other nefarious character, but because I don’t want to be an enabler for a police state. And the more people who take these measures, the weaker the police state will be.
Step One: Research.
Amazingly, Wikipedia has very little to say on the subject of encrypted e-mail. It is as if the topic has been edited or censored. But there are sites with good information. Subsribing to The Guardian daily update, I was led to http://www.abine.com, where I picked up DoNotTrackMe and MaskMe (both free) to reduce my footprints through the InterWebs. There is a long list of other tools on their blog post here:
Abine led me to https://prism-break.org/ which is a very good resource for a technical audience. Between the two sites there is a comprehensive list of tools, software, services, and operating systems to use to keep your data safe.
I also gathered information from EFF, the ACLU, other blogs, and other news sources. Sadly, one of the common threads was that the United States (sweet land of Liberty) along with Apple, Microsoft and Google were major players in the current “gather all the metadata” plague.
Step Two: New Countries, New Tools.
It is clear that no US-based company can prevent government data collection, nor can they even tell you when it happens. UK and the EU are also right alongside the US in this regard. So where to go? My research led me to Switzerland and Iceland.
Switzerland has strong privacy laws, and is the home of MyKolab (https://mykolab.com/), a secure replacement for Google Apps. But the US broke Swiss banking privacy laws, and who knows if they will also break Swiss data privacy laws? One thing is clear, however, because MyKolab is a “dot-com”, the US has the power to break internet access by forcing ISPs to redirect traffic. This is true of any .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, or .info site. So Switzerland is good for now, but for how long?
That lead me to Iceland. Iceland has very aggressive privacy laws, are not part of the EU, are fiercely independent, and have shown through their actions that they are against government attacks on data privacy.
And as an upside, their climate and green electricity make for a planet-friendly place to run data centers.
Iceland’s domain registrar allows anyone to register a .is domain. And the US government cannot interfere easily with a website with a .is domain name running on a server in Iceland. So now I have a few domains assigned by https://www.isnic.is/en/ running on servers in Reykjavik that I am leasing from http://www.orangewebsite.com/web_hosting.php.
Orange doesn’t know my e-mail address because I used MaskMe (https://www.abine.com/maskme/) to obscure it as well as to generate a strong password. I have not gotten as far as BitCoin, but Orange would accept it if I had.
Progress So Far:
– DoNotTrackMe and MaskMe installed as FireFox plug-ins.
– Domains registered in Iceland.
– Web hosting established in Iceland.
No Spies Allowed 