My Inherent Right to Privacy

With all this recent talk of domestic spying, we’ve been hearing some pretty interesting things about how the NSA and the federal government operate. Most of these facts aren’t new to anyone, especially me. But the recent happenings have gotten me thinking nonetheless.

The NSA has taps on every major information pipe in the country. This isn’t even a secret.

You are restricted on the level of encryption you are allowed to use in this country. You aren’t allowed to use an encryption key larger than 256 bits. Why? Because the NSA wants to be able to crack your communications if they choose to.

Well, my viewpoint on all of this is not only does the government not have an inherent right to monitor my communications, but I have an inherent right to my own privacy. There is a concept called “innocent until proven guilty”, which isn’t always practiced in this country. Many people will say “Well, why does it matter if your communications are being monitored? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Yeah? Well on the same note, if I am assumed innocent then the government also has nothing to worry about.

Why does the federal government get this special place in our lives that they evidently have a right to know everything we say and do? I personally call for civil disobedience. Use methods such as anonymizers to protect your identity (tutorial here). Use strong encryption to protect your communications. It is a shame that these technologies aren’t built-in to our everyday communication systems.

• Doesn’t or didn’t PGP offer 4096 bit encryption?

  I remember taxing the old 286 for about half a day to create a 1024 bit PGP key in like 1995.

• Not sure. I still want to look into this. To be honest, I am not very well encrypted. I want to get set up with encrypted email, IM, and others.