brendan halpin

Here in the good old USA, we will soon be ruled by a collection of clowns, villains, and villainous clowns. I think it’s time we started taking the idea of protecting our data a little more seriously. Even though it’s a pain in the ass and you probably feel like you have nothing to hide.

We know from the Snowden leaks that the US government has vast electronic surveillance capability. They listen to our phone calls and read our text messages. We also know that tech titans have already lined up to curry favor with our new king, and it’s hard to imagine any of them saying “come back with a warrant” if the Justice Department led by The Bad Guy From Lazytown comes asking for your data.

“So what?” you might say. “I’m boring. Let ‘em read my texts! They’ll just see my spouse telling me to remember to pick up eggs on the way home!”

And fair enough. Very very few of us are revolutionaries. But, without being too alarmist, I’d like to suggest that we now all have things to hide.

This is immediately true if you plan to engage in any kind of resistance activities at all, from attending a protest to helping people cross state lines to get reproductive or gender-affirming care, or even just saying snarky things in the group text. Let’s say, God forbid, someone shoots at a powerful person you dislike, and you send, “too bad they missed” to the group text. Do you want a visit from the Secret Service? Because that’s really not a paranoid scenario under our new regime.

Even without any new horrible laws being passed, if you’ve visited a dispensary in one of the many states where marijuana is legalized, you’ve committed a federal crime punishable by up to one year in jail. Is this a federal government you trust not to act on that information?

Do you belong to a labor union? Don’t be surprised to find any and all union activities criminalized, because that’s what fascists do. If you’re on a group text planning a job action, you could find yourself on the wrong end of a RICO prosecution. (Seriously. They charged cop city protestors in Georgia under RICO statutes. I would be surprised if teachers unions in red states aren’t targeted in the same way if they dare to strike.)

Okay, you may say, but I’m not doing any of that stuff. I don’t belong to a union, I will never criticize the government in a text message, and I will not be the cool aunt who helps my teenage niece cross state lines to get medical care. Well, I still think you should take some steps to protect your data.

The principle is the same as getting vaccinated. Securing your communications protects everyone. Maybe you’re determined to cooperate with anything this government does, but are you a hundred percent sure that everyone you know and love is in the same boat? If your best friend texts you asking about abortion restrictions in your state, do you want to be the reason the cops came knocking on their door?

Maybe I’m being paranoid. I will certainly admit to this possibility. But the worst case scenario here seems to be that we all take some small steps to make our data more private that cost us nothing. Seems like an okay gamble to me.

There are a lot of people who know way more than me writing about how to secure your data, so look around, but I’m going to give you some recommendations.

Easiest and probably most important: Move all your texting to Signal, or, failing that, Whatsapp.

Here’s the why, which you can skip if you’re not interested. Right now there’s no way to send messages that are encrypted end to end (meaning only the sender and the recipient can read them and even the company providing the service can’t see the content of your messages) between iPhones and Androids. (this is coming via RCS chats, but it’s not here yet.). Even if you only communicate with people with iPhones, Apple stores unencrypted copies of text messages for anyone who has iCloud backup turned on for their text messaging. Which means there’s no way to ever be sure that your message is not being stored as plain text somewhere and therefore accessible to the government. Whatsapp is end-to-end encrypted by default, but it is owned by Meta, the people who brought you Facebook, so they are almost certainly tracking and selling your metadata, meaning who you’re texting when. But still, the content is safe. If you use Signal, the only information anyone can extract is the last time you accessed the service.

Important caveat: Whatsapp and Signal messages can be read if law enforcement has your phone in their possession and runs an extraction tool on it. If you followed the Karen Read trial and remember the awful texts that lead investigator Michael Proctor sent about her, those were Whatsapp messages. You can protect yourself from this by setting your Whatsapp and Signal messages to automatically disappear after a certain period of time, and you probably should.

More advanced: You shouldn’t use email to say anything sensitive (again, remembering that the definition of sensitive is about to expand) anyway because it’s an inherently insecure medium—you can’t control what the recipient does with the message, so you should assume all emails you send are public. Still, you can stop governments and corporations (and remember, there’s about to be no difference between the two) from combing through all your emails at once by switching to a non-US-based email provider that you pay for. I pay 50 bucks a year for Fastmail. Proton Mail is priced similarly.

Again, I think it’s a terrible idea to trust any US-based corporation to protect your data, so you should assume that anything you have in cloud storage is public information. (You should also assume it’s being used to train AI, but my feeling is that that concern is soon going to feel pretty quaint.) External hard drives are a cheap way to back up your data, and it’s also very easy to set up a Network Attached Storage device to, for example, automatically back up your phone photos. (I did this and I am not a computer programmer or even knowledgeable about how computers work.) If you’re concerned that you might lose all your data in a fire if it’s in your house, you can get a fireproof box from WalMart for 85 bucks and keep an external hard drive in there when you’re not actively backing up.

Don’t forget about the advantages of pen and paper. Stuff you write down is impossible to access from a distance, and it takes no expertise and very little effort to permanently destroy anything written on paper. So maybe a paper planner instead of an online calendar, for example, will ensure that you’re the only one who has access to your calendar.

There are a lot more things you can do if you get really into this, but given that you can switch to encrypted, disappearing messages for free, my feeling is that everyone should do this so we can all help keep each other safe.