ProPublica: A Buyer's Guide to Safer Communication

Silent Circle

What does it let you do? Silent Circle is a commercial service that lets you text chat and make calls over your phone and video chat on Windows with end-to-end encryption and SSL.

Silent Circle has the benefit of being purpose-built for security, and a lot of thought has gone into its design, making it easy to use. It’s got some drawbacks: It’s centralized, it’s closed-source and it costs money, which means the people running it need to know your real identity for you to use it. At the cheapest level, Silent Circle can be had right now for $10 a month with an annual subscription. You can only use some features with other Silent Circle subscribers.

What does it replace? Silent Circle replaces regular phone calls and text messages, and Skype for Windows. (Other operating systems are under development at this time)

Using a service like Silent Circle exposes one very important piece of data: That you are someone concerned enough about security to pay for it. That bit of consumer behavior that sends a strong political message, but it may also give the impression to attackers, state or otherwise, that you feel you have something worth attacking -- more so than the other services listed here.

Silent Circle also has an email offering, but like all encrypted email, it leaks metadata.

Tor

What does it let you do? Tor does one simple and important thing: It hides your IP address.

Tor is completely separate from encryption. It doesn’t encrypt your metadata on the Internet via SSL. It doesn’t know whether or not you’re encrypting your messages. But your IP address is one of the hardest to mask and most personally identifying pieces of metadata there is on the net. As a result, Tor is used for anonymous speech and censorship evasion around the world. How Tor works.

What does it replace? Services called VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, hide your IP and data from the wider internet by passing it through a encrypted private network. Tor duplicates one function of a VPN, but in a decentralized way. Rather than a single encrypted private network, Tor piggybacks your internet connection through a bunch of network connections run by volunteers. As far as the experts know, nobody can reliably record all Tor traffic, nor know the real origin of any internet connection.

Tor is the hardest tool to use on this list, but what it does is very powerful. Be prepared to give this one a little time. There's plenty of documentation to help you along.

Tor Clients

The Tor Browser Bundle for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

The Tor browser bundle makes using Tor much easier. It comes with the Tor system, called Vidalia, and a Tor browser (based on Firefox) set up to use it. You can put Vidalia together with any other application on this list to hide your IP, even from the service you’re using.

Orbot and Orweb for Android

Orbot is the Guardian Project’s cellphone-sized version of Vidalia. Orweb is a Tor browser for your phone. Orbot can route any Android application with options for setting a “proxy server” through Tor, hiding your IP. For instance, it works with the Twitter app. Despite the first message you see, you don’t have to “root” your phone to use it; ignore that message.

The Onion Browser for iOS

Onion Browser is a Tor-powered web browser for iOS devices, written by Mike Tigas, who currently works at ProPublica as its Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow. Onion Browser allows you to use the web over Tor without having to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad. Like Tor Browser Bundle and Orweb, your traffic is encrypted and anonymized. Unlike the others, Onion Browser is a standalone app and cannot proxy traffic for other apps on your device.

So Many Tools, So Little Room.

There are many tools we haven't discussed here. Some, like Jitsi (Voice-Over-IP audio and video calls), because it's still too hard for the average user. Others, like PGP for email, because it doesn't address the issue of mass metadata surveillance that is the focus of this article. And still others, like Wickr for iOS, because I just don’t have the room. But you can have fun with it: These services and many other out there do a great job of encrypting your messages and your metadata, and put you back in control of who gets to watch you on your networks.

This can all seem overwhelming, but learning even one tool makes the next one much easier to understand conceptually. These tools will get easier for everyone with time and development. The internet has, throughout its history, responded to threats by toughening up; threats change and the Internet evolves with it. It’s an ecology as much as a network, a wild place, sometimes a forest, sometimes a swamp. It’s early days, but the internet is where we live more and more of our lives, and as we get a sense of it, living there safely will become a normal part of life.

“The news this week makes a lot of people feel helpless,” said Abel Luck, one of the Guardian Project developers. “There’s a war on privacy on, and every time you use a bit of cryptography, you’re winning.”

Computer designed by Anton Outkine from The Noun Project

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