Cory Doctorow on practical privacy

Privacy as Innovation with Cory Doctorow from Lovisa on Vimeo.

Cory has:

• An encrypted hard drive on his computer
• An encrypted phone
• He installs a jail broken version of Android (CyanogenMod) which has lots of better privacy stuff built in
• He uses Cryptocat to have sensitive real-time communications
• He uses PGP for email (full disclosure - it was Cory that finally prompted me some years ago to dust off my PGP keys)
• He tries to use PGP routinely with everyone he knows who has a PGP key hence routine email traffic is all encrypted and any interceptions can't been instantly filtered as the potentially interesting or sensitive ones because they happen to be the only ones encrypted
• He uses The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde's IPREDator proxy service to proxy his traffic especially on untrusted networks
• He uses SSL and TLS on his server, craphound.com to allow him to communicate with it securely and the same with boingboing
• All his passwords are very long, randomly generated strings; ideally 128 printable characters, all kept on a file separately encrypted on his computer hard drive but nowhere else (apart from a backup). When he needs to enter a password he goes to that file and copies and pastes the passwords but doesn't remember them. He has only one password he can remember - to access the encrypted file of passwords
• He has an encrypted hard drive he backs up to at the office and another that he backs up to at home

Things need to be a bit simpler for ordinary people... 

He does believe though we have not reached peak surveillance, we may have reached peak indifference to surveillance. So people may now start asking for built in privacy features in technology to a degree that will rein in the dominant surveillance business model of the internet and the surveillance state.