I’ve got a black feeling this morning after reading that the Supreme Court is requiring all US companies to store employee email and instant messaging. It’s fucking ridiculous, not only in burden of cost for companies to store that data, but in the loss of privacy and reality of it’s usefulness.

Anyway you look at it, it’s a punch in the balls for personal privacy. Slap a jock strap on that shit and be a man. Start using encryption. Check out GPG for encrypting email and personal files. If you use Thunderbird as an email client, there’s a real handy plugin called Enigmail that makes phasing in encryption pretty damn simple. For Instant messaging, switch to GAIM (cross-platform), Adium (OSX) or Kopete (KDE Linux). All three have some form of built-in encryption or plugin available. Adium and GAIM both can run OTR, an encryption and plausible deniability plugin. Kopete uses GPG to encrypt and as far as I know, there’s not another client that does that (there’s a plugin for GAIM, but I hear it doesn’t work well with more recent versions).

All these programs are free and open source. If you’re not using anything, I’d suggest you seriously consider it. For web browsing, think about using a proxy, like Tor or if you have the skills or patience to set it up, SSH tunnel to an outside server running squid (here’s a link to how I do it). If you don’t have access to a server like I’ve got, you can run squid on your home computer and connect to it from work. If you don’t have a static IP at home, you can use a free service like No-IP to get access. ISPs don’t like customers running servers out of their home, but if you SSH tunnel it, your chances of getting noticed are pretty nil. I tunnel squid to a remote server I keep and it works very well. I also have Tor installed on all my machines and run it as a server on my remote machine to give back to the network. It’s doubtful you need a proxy for all the web browsing you do in the course of a day at the office, but the option for security and privacy is good to have (not to mention the ability to get around restrictive firewalls).

If you don’t care about all this, so be it. Maybe that’s fine for you. But, depending on who you are and what you do in your life and for a living, you might want to take heed especially if you give a damn about your personal rights and privacy.