Do you have a VPN? A PGP key? 2 factor authentication?

[hunter]

16. The Opera browser has a free VPN; also ad blocking built in.

http://www.opera.com/computer/features/free-vpn

It's handy to use in places where wifi connections are open and insecure.

I don't block ads on sites I care about, but most of those sites don't have terribly intrusive advertising either.

Personally I'm paranoid about a lot of stuff, but I don't lock my car because I hate getting my windows broken. It doesn't matter how I lock down my home, it's protected by Doug. Beware of Doug.



And then there's Spot under the staircase who's best left sleeping.

.

And the ants... God no, you don't want to mess with the ants.

I have a great distaste for spy-vs-spy stuff. I might have made a good living with it, a nice secure government job, but I'm pacifist, I don't do that sort of thing, and I don't do oaths either. I will keep or reveal secrets as my own conscience demands which is not something they want to hear when they are checking you out for security clearances.

I'd never trust my life to any kind of computer security. It's possible every modern computer has a keylogger built into it, just sleeping until some unknown signal awakens it. Computers hardware and software is so complex now that no individual person, not even a small well funded team, can know what's going on in there. Modern computers are nothing like my old Atari 800 that held few mysteries. One person could understand most of it. Even heavily protected software was soon cracked.

As for the internet, we still supposedly live in a free nation and I'm not going to be quiet about my political beliefs. I'm not bothered by DU's lack of encryption.

Yes, the primary reason to use encryption, and the only good reason I can think of, is that it makes the job of the spies more difficult. It makes an "important" encrypted message harder to find amidst all the trivial encrypted traffic. But that works both ways. Encryption is used by the good guys as well as the bad.