I don’t have a Jones for the French, but as a people and as a country, they’re some tough hommes et femmes. The French have much to answer for, with respect to Algeria, Mali, Rwanda, and other parts of central and west Africa in which they were ruthless colonialists.

But, they’re on the right side of the moral line, now. This week, French commandos were in Mali, helping roust and capture Islamist militants who had taken over a hotel with 170 people in it. Not too long ago, when the same groups of militants seized the entire northern part of the country, the French went in and routed them, and gave control of the country back to the legitimate government.

The administration of Bill Clinton unambiguously shares responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Not only did the President and members of his Cabinet know about the genocide, they actively blocked attempts by the UN Security Council to intervene and stop it. Between 50% and 70% of the Tutsi population of Rwanda were hacked, shot, and burned to death, over a 3-month period, with full knowledge of the American government.

The French, whose role in that period remains controversial (Rwanda is a former French colony, the French gov’t publicly backed the Hutu-led government, and armed its military forces), nonetheless were the only western nation to actively intervene to stop the genocide. The only one.

The French told George Bush to kiss their derrières when he wanted their help invading Iraq, and were roundly condemned by many denizens of Gutlesswankistan. Their position in that instance (again) turned out to be the morally correct one. And now, even after the attacks in January, and last week, the French remain committed to taking in 30,000 refugees — three times the number being accepted by the Land of Weak-in-the-Knees. Again, making the morally correct choice.

Neither the French nor the Americans have more than a foot on the moral high ground. We’re all the beneficiaries of some nasty and immoral actions by both our ancestors, and by our present day governments.

But the French can claim one whole leg up on Americans, in refusing to be cowed by the terrorists at home. They aren’t running for the bomb shelters, turning away women and children at the borders, out of sweating fear. And, they can claim another leg up on Americans, abroad. French soldiers are on the ground, putting their lives at risk, to help other countries in the fight against terrorists.

Those who clamor against allowing any Syrians — men, boys, girls, women — into the country, should walk it back, and take a look at the French. Right now, your “freedom fries” are look downright limp.  I’ll take mine French.

Wyman, David S. Introduction by Elie Wiesel. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: The New Press. 1998. ISBN 1-56584-415-7.

This passage is excerpted from Dr. Wyman’s Preface to his book.

In summary, then, these are the findings I find most significant:

1. The American State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large numbers of European Jews. … their policies aimed at obstructing rescue possibilities and dampening public pressures for government action.

2. Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for fourteen months, then moved only because he was confronted with political pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies.

3. The War Refugee Board, which the President then established to save Jews and other victims of the Nazis, received little power, almost no cooperation from Roosevelt or his administration, and grossly inadequate funding. (Contributions from Jewish organizations, which were necessarily limited, covered 90 percent of the WRB’s costs.) WRB managed to help save approximately 200,000 Jews and 20,000 non-Jews.

4. Because of State Department administrative policies, only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the United States during the three and one-half years the nation was at war with Germany. That amounted to 10 percent of the number who could have been legally admitted under the immigration quotas during that period.

5. Strong popular pressure for action would have brought a much fuller government commitment to rescue and would have produced it sooner.

6. American Jewish leaders worked to publicize the European Jewish situation and pressed for government rescue steps.

7. In 1944, the United States War Department rejected several appeals to bomb the Auschwitz gas chambers and railroads leading to Auschwitz, claiming that such actions would divert essential air-power from decisive operations elsewhere. Yet, in the very months that it was turning down the pleas, numerous massive American bombing raids were taking place within fifty miles of Auschwitz. Twice during that time, large fleets of American heavy bombers struck industrial targets in the Auschwitz complex itself, not five miles from the gas chambers.

8. … The record also reveals that the reasons repeatedly invoked by government officials for not being able to rescue Jews could be put aside when it came to other Europeans who needed help.

9. Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to so momentous an historical event as the systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency.

10. Poor though it was, the American rescue record was better than that of Great Britain, Russia, or the other Allied nations.

At the end of the preface, Dr. Wyman asks:

Would the reaction be different today? Would Americans be more sensitive, less self-centered, more willing to make sacrifices, less afraid of differences now than they were then?

I think we all know that the answer is, “No.” Even the people now advocating turning away from refugees admit their own positions in this matter. They don’t care.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the time standard for the United States. It operates a collection of clocks and measuring tools that together help determine UTC — known internationally as UTC(NIST).

These tools are located at a laboratory in Boulder, CO. In addition to the laboratory, NIST uses a nearby radio station, WWVB, to broadcast a time signal relayed to it from the laboratory. A radio-controlled clock (RCC) has a tiny listener that can pick up this signal and translate it into the current time according to the atomic clock; the firmware inside the clock mechanism then uses that information to adjust the clock to match the signaled time.

I have an RCC, have had it for quite a few years. As is typical for these clocks, besides keeping accurate time, the clock also captures internal and external temperatures, and relative humidity. Unfortunately, enough years have passed that my clock’s external temperature monitoring unit has bit it. I just ordered a new, improved model of RCC. I don’t have a real need for a clock that is accurate to ±0.5 second per day. I just like the idea.

The current model synchronizes the time only once, at 0200. If the sync fails, then it waits 24 hours for the next sync, during which period it will lose/gain as much as 0.5 sec — OR MORE!! The clock time would then be as much as 1 second off. OR MORE!! The new model will sync every hour, 0000 to 0600, until it is successful, or fails at 0600.

Among other things, the RCC demonstrates how artificial our computation of “time” has become. We often associate UTC, or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), with scientific and technical measurements. But UTC is actually a kludge — an average of times from 70 clock laboratories around the world. UTC exists to maintain a clock that is timed with the Earth’s rotation. This requires that it periodically have leap seconds shoved into its time cycle. Scientific time is maintained as a separate clock that is not munged in this way.

“The oscillator found inside an RCC is based on the mechanical vibrations of a quartz crystal, typically counting 32,768 vibrations of the crystal to mark one second.” ¹

A mere 32,768 vibrations per second! Not nearly good enough!

“… the second is defined internationally as the duration of 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of a cesium atom.” ²

Bwahaha! Now you’re talking accuracy!

Marcus du Sautoy has done a 3-part documentary, Precision: The Measure of All Things, for BBC Four, it’s quite good. Part one is on time and distance.

Oh, BTW, the international standard is maintained by the French, the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. ³

References

Time-scales and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, Elisa Felicitas Arias, Director, Time Department, International Bureau of Weights and Measures. ITU News, 2013

From now on, four PTB primary atomic clocks will contribute to UTC. Press release, 2010

One leg of the internet security stool is the SSL certificate. The cert is the basis for the transport encryption that protects your data from prying hackers — well, supposedly, although there have been suggestions that the NSA could probably break current SSL. But, anyway, NSA is probably not going to steal your identity.

SSL certificates cost money. Potentially, a lot of money. The reason is, each certificate is created for one specific web server or property. When you create a cert, you specifically assign it to “www.upyours.com,” or “secure.keepyourhandsoffmystack.com” — and that cert is technically no good anywhere else. By technically, I mean that you can use it somewhere else, like “iamtoocheaptobuyacert.org,” but anyone who hits that site is going to get a certificate error. The certificate error is going to tell you that the cert name does not match the site name, and you should not go there.

The idea behind this name matching scheme is to prevent attacks in which the attacker uses a dummy certificate to trick you into going to the wrong site. As a cautious user, you would never go to a site that has a name mismatch.

Of course, you aren’t a cautious user, you’re a determined one — determined to spend money at some company that’s too cheap to buy all the certs it actually needs. And so, you click past the certificate error and get on to that wallet action.

Another common certificate error that you will encounter is the “no trusted authority” error. The second leg of the security stool is that certificates must be issued by a recognized “certificate authority,” also known as the root certificate authority. Verisign is one example of a company authorized to act as such an authority. This authority is supposed to act as guarantor that your secure connection is going to a legitimate site, and not some hacky-sack phony.

When web sites are under development, many instances of the site will be in the hands of developers, and consequently, many certs may be needed. But, they’re not needed for public or internet usage — only for private usage. So, web development environments like Visual Studio provide simple tools that can be used to create a “self-signed” certificate. This certificate allows developers to create the necessary environment for their code.

The problem arises when the development is complete and the new site is published — along with the “self-signed” certificate. For various reasons, at top of which list is “save money,” companies decide not to swap in a legitimate certificate when the site goes live, and instead continue to use the “self-signed,” illegitimate, free one.

Now, you have two legs of the stool sawn through part way. To protect users against bogus certificates, a web site’s SSL certificate should be issued to the site name, and it should be issued by a trusted root authority. To save money, possibly also from laziness, legitimate companies use SSL data encryption, but deliberately ignore the rules of putting that security in place. By so doing, they imbue users with the sense that certificate errors don’t matter, and habituate them to clicking past them without serious thought. But, the third leg of our security stool is the willingness of users to attend to, and take seriously, certificate errors.

It’s not the 99% of the times that the landing site is legitimate, it’s the 1% when it’s not, that will do damage.

I really get irked by these certificate errors. Comcast is one such sinner — its subdomain activate.comcast.com uses a self-signed certificate. Another is my bank, Mutual Security Credit Union. It recently farmed out its online account management tools to a third party, but still continues to use its mscu.net certificate, even though the site is now at netteller.com. It’s BS, and I don’t see an end to it, unless somebody really gets burned by one of these illegitimate certs. Isn’t that the way of it?

This quotation is taken from Karl Popper’s 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.

The text is taken from the end notes to Chapter 7, as indicated by the cite. I’ve taken the liberty of re-paragraphing it, as the original is one gigantic block of text, and (I find that) these chunks are hard to follow. I also add the bolded text for my own purposes; the italic fonts are in the original.

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any restraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. … Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. … [T]hat the principle of majority-rule may lead to self contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson … I do not think, however, that Nelson … was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty. All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands [differently] … We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.) ¹

Popper has captured with complete clarity, the situation in the modern western world, and particularly, in America. Our tolerance of intolerance has brought the country to its knees. The intolerant have manipulated both the law and the society brilliantly, to establish intolerance as a fundamental right, and not as the quality it is — an act that is fundamentally destructive of the society and, eventually, of the country.

The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.

— Baptist minister John Leland (1754-1841)

The maintenance of liberty in a country is dependent on a balanced use of force. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted,

The limitations of the human mind and imagination, the inability of human beings to transcend their own interests sufficiently to envisage the interests of their fellow-men as clearly as they do their own makes force an inevitable part of the process of social cohesion. But the same force which guarantees peace also makes for injustice. ²

Liberty within our society lives in the balance between forcibly restraining the unjust and absolutely permitting toleration at all levels. Modern America has chosen to extend the reach of the unjust, allowing them to deny certain groups their full measure of liberty, by sanctifying the tolerance of intolerance.

It’s not free speech, and not a fundamental right, to call a black man a n*gger. It is intolerance, an action to deprive that black man of his liberty as effectively as throwing him to the ground and putting him in shackles. No black individual — no man, woman, or child — is free, in America, to go anywhere, to take part in American society, without having the threat of, or the actual, limits placed on their activities by the intolerant. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, my father said to me, “I am in favor of civil rights, but I should not be forced to sell my house to a black man if I don’t want to.” Even at the age of 15, I knew this was ridiculous nonsense. Fifty years later, people still make this same ridiculous statement to me. I no longer extend to them the courtesy of thinking they’re just confused. They’re intolerant, and deliberately baking intolerance into the structure of the society.

If you find that your defense of liberty pits you against the people whose liberty is actually threatened, you’re doing it wrong. If your conception of liberty demands that one group of people be allowed to restrict the liberty of another, through social and economic intolerance, and through violence, you’re doing it wrong. If your conception of liberty leads you to declare that the haves must be protected from the have-nots, and not the other way around, you’re doing it wrong. If you find that your religion blesses intolerance, you’re doing it wrong. If you think that intolerance will make society a better place, by driving away the undesirables, … you’re just wrong.

A country can only be free when its citizens are brave enough to refuse to tolerate intolerance.

Yesterday, I was in the city. As always, when I come into Grand Central Terminal (GCT), I am overwhelmed with the grandeur and engineering of that terminal.

When you first experience the great hall, you may look up and marvel at the beautiful (now restored) vault. And, you may remark on the vastness of the hall, which is difficult to appreciate unless you go up onto the mezzanine and look out over it. The grilled windows for buying tickets the old-fashioned way, the central kiosk for information services, the big reader boards, all link to the past and are plainly in view. Off to the side, the roomful of ATMs and the roomful of ticket dispensers, where most tickets are purchased by travelers who know where they’re going, and how to navigate the somewhat Byzantine process of ticketing.

But, to my mind, even more remarkable is the subterranean engineering. The terminal has two levels of train tracks coming into it, one above the other. These commuter trains descend into tunnels a good ten minutes away from the terminal, in Harlem. Having arrived at the terminal, commuters exit the train onto the platform, and then choose to go into the terminal, or instead, exit the platform in the other direction, through subterranean walkways that can come out onto streets as much as two blocks away from the main terminal building. If you were just walking down the sidewalk, you probably would not even notice these entries into the terminal — unless a stream of commuters was being ejected into the street.

Rush hour trains arriving and leaving will have around 7 cars, with roughly 100 commuters per car. It’s a marvelous sight, to stand at the top of the platform walkway, and watch two trains disgorging passengers onto the platform, one on either side, all 1400 or so heading toward one of the exits with just one thought in mind — get out of here. It really is a river of humanity.

Often, these experiences of the GCT are accompanied by the reflection that Americans will never again build anything substantial, beautiful, and inspiring, as is this building. We just don’t have it in us, anymore.  The idea of public service is not dead, but the idea of creating lasting public monuments, is.

I was banned from the Facebook page for The Christian Left, this morning (Wed 09 Sept 2015); as near as I can make out, this was done in retribution for pissing on the political style of “progressives,” and more than once. Okay, so maybe I did number one and number two in their cornflakes.

Basically, the argument I was making at the time I was banned, was as follows.

American progressive politics is in the crapper because progressives have been content to use the Federal government as their court of first resort, in all fights for rights or protections. Instead of fighting on the ground, at the state and local levels, to preserve and expand liberties, they go straight to Washington DC, pay a bunch of lobbyists millions of dollars, and get a Federal law or executive action, and sometimes, a SCOTUS decision in their favor.

As a result of this progressive reliance on the national government, which has been ongoing for forty years, the conservative activists retreated to the state and local governments. They organized there, they got their representatives on the school boards, the regional authorities, the city councils, the state legislatures, and in the governors’ mansions.

The conservative successes at the ground level were not foregone conclusions. They were directly the result of the opposition — “progressives” — conceding the ground because they assumed that they’d have the shibboleth of the Federal government, with which they could beat the states into submission.

Now, we have numerous issues and struggles, in which progressives are fighting rear-guard actions. We’re fighting to roll back the accomplishments of conservatives, rather than preventing them in the first place.

• Abortion rights.
  Boxed in, seemingly, with Roe v Wade at the national level, conservatives devised what can only be described as a brilliant strategy. They can’t outlaw abortions outright, so they make them as difficult as possible to get, unleashing an onslaught of regulations, rules, and requirements, so difficult to meet in the practical and in the legal matter, that medical clinics providing abortions have disappeared like dust in a wind.

How did this happen? The overwhelming majority of Americans favor abortion rights. Where were NARAL, NOW, and the DNC, 20, 30, 40 years ago, when the state and local legislatures were being filled up with conservatives who would promulgate these rules?

• Gun Control.
  The proportion of Americans who favor background checks and other controls on firearms is so lopsided that pols should be lining up to write the bill. 80% of Americans favor background checks for all firearm purchases. And yet, we’ve had a decade in which we have witnessed horrific slaughters; and the images of tiny children shot dead, lying in pools of their own blood, were not sufficient to bring about even the most trivial actions to curb the general availability of firearms.

How did this happen? It happens because, again, progressives have relied on the shibboleth of Federal power to pursue measures of control that should have been pursued at the state and local levels. States have the power to implement background checks. They have the power to control all aspects of the handling of firearms within their borders.¹

The Senators and Representatives in the national legislature overwhelmingly are drawn from the state legislatures, and from organizations that work with those legislatures. Recent decades have seen some fairly spectacular flame-outs by wealthy individuals who tried to buy their ways into a House or Senate seat by expending huge amounts of personal capital. Legislators at the national level more often represent the politics of their constituencies in the home legislatures, than they do the ones on the ground.

• War on Drugs.
  Here’s another case in which the public opinion is overwhelmingly against current government policy. And yet … are we having a WTF moment? Yet?

Again, the driving forces behind this “war” are/were local. And, the driving forces on ending it are local. States are taking matters into their own hands, and decriminalizing, legalizing, regulating and taxing, the uses of drugs that a few years ago, were utterly proscribed by the Federal government. The actions to ending the War on Drugs are being taken at the local levels. Oh, but wait, slow down the bus so that the progressives, still waiting hat in hand at the national legislature, can get on board.

I find that most people do not know that Prohibition, the buzz word for making the entire United States an alcohol-free zone, was the result of a decades-long, grassroots fight by the Temperance movement. The US was dried up by a Constitutional amendment, and, as you all know (right?), such an amendment requires the approval of the majority of the states. At the time Prohibition finally came in at the national level, 37 states had already banned alcoholic beverages within their own borders. Yes, that’s right, contrary to popular mythology, Prohibition was not the overreach of a Federal government overrun by power-mad do-gooders violating states’ rights. Prohibition was the Federal government coming in behind the states and codifying states’ actions at the national level.

• Private Prisons
  This is the issue that was on the radar when I became insufferably objectionable to the moderator at The Christian Left. Bernie Sanders has made the announcement that he is introducing a bill into the Senate to “end all private prisons” within two years. Now, I have a question as to how he proposes to do that, actually. State prison systems are just that — state systems. What is the Constitutional authority under which the Federal government is going to dictate how any individual state is going to run its prison system?

The tenth amendment to the Constitution, the final element of the original Bill of Rights.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Blood has been shed over the significance of the words of this amendment. But, to this citizen, who is not a Constitutional lawyer and doesn’t pretend to be one on the internuts; but who has read the entire Constitution, top to bottom; the power of states absolutely includes the power to design and implement prison systems as they see fit. I do not see the Constitutional authority under which the Federal government can take over all state prison systems and mandate the design of them.

Now, the Federal prison system has some dealings with private contractors, and certainly, Sanders can introduce a law that removes those contractors from the Federal prison system. And, there are some instances in which Federal prisoners are housed within state systems, instances in which the Federal government could stipulate that these prisoners could not be held in privately run prisons.

According to the ACLU, inmates in private prisons make up 6% of state prisoners, 16% of Federal prisoners, and a smattering of prisoners in local jails in certain states.² Considering the enormous numbers of citizens locked up in American prison systems, these numbers represent a substantial number of citizens under the control of for-profit enterprises. But, they’re insignificant by comparison to the number of citizens already under care of state operated and Federally operated prisons.

I don’t want to trivialize the dangers to all those prisoners being mishandled in pursuit of profit. I do want to point out that the amount of damage being inflicted in for-profit prisons is minuscule when compared to the damage being inflicted on the 94% of inmates who already are under state care, and the 84% of inmates already being mishandled by Federal authorities.

Bluntly, the campaign against for-profit prisons has sound moral imperatives, but will have little impact on the care of prison inmates, overall. In my view, the issue of for-profit prisons is a great issue for tub thumping at campaign whistle stops, and is nearly irrelevant with respect to reducing the mass incarceration of low-level, non-violent offenders in the United States.

I object on principle to the derogatory discussion of her marriages.

They are not relevant to the case. If issuing marriage licenses to divorced persons were under dispute, then such discussion would be relevant. Arguments should be attacked on their own grounds. Shifting the grounds of the argument, in order to undermine the character of the opponent — aka “shooting the messenger” — simply “wins,” or at least engages in, some other argument.

(The actual statements in this article are wrong — divorce was quite “Biblical” in Jesus’ time. Some knowledge of the Bible would have helped the author avoid stepping on his own tongue. )

I find this type of ad hominem, ridiculing her personal life, particularly distasteful. Some people are assholes, and invite abuse. Think George Zimmerman. Others simply blunder into a situation and are unable to find a satisfactory way out. Ridiculing her on her marriages, or her appearance, the way she talks, as people have been doing — to me, these behaviors smack of class prejudice. It’s on the same level as ridiculing a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk. Such ridicule is also unchristian.

Often, a person who has undergone significant personal struggles, finds, at last, a way of coping that seems both legitimate and successful. That person may then fear deviating from the path prescribed by that coping mechanism. That fear of deviation is justifiable. We are not surprised, nor do we object, when a reformed alcoholic refuses to “have just one drink.” We understand, and accept, the danger that is represented by that “just one drink.”

In the case of Kim Davis, that coping mechanism appears to be Apostolic Christianity. For better or worse, she has fixated on her sect’s opposition to gay marriage, and she may well fear deviation from the path specified by that opposition. I think that quite possibly she sought pastoral counseling, and the pastor advised her to do what she is doing. I might be wrong. She just doesn’t seem a person with the character or views, to make a publicly humiliating display of herself, without some kind of encouragement to do so.

I might be quite wrong. But, descriptions of her various marital antics give the impression of someone narcissistic and manipulative. Such a person might find the unexpected spotlight of this legal battle attractive, even irresistible. That person definitely will not find jail at all attractive.

Her arguments in justification of her behavior are not valid. They’re not legally valid, they’re not morally valid. They’re not valid in terms of doctrine. If discussion needs to be had, it should be confined to her arguments; leave off on her marital confusions, her sense of style, and her personal habits.

I was reading the other day about the next-gen Windows browser, Edge, that replaces Internet Exploder in Windows 10. Apparently, the browser informs Microsoft of just about everything to do with your activities, even your GPS location. Disabling this “feature set” means yet another string of window and mouse clicks, specific to the tool.

I’m just so sick of that horse hockey.  One is forced to adopt a strategic plan regarding online privacy.

What is my goal for online security?

• Prevent my financial information and related personal information from being sprayed indiscriminately around the internuts.
• Fuck with the gummint, because, ‘Murica.
• Establish a beachhead for data security, in view of the probability that the gummint is (still) going after data unlawfully.

Security Begins At Home

I accomplish these goals mostly by using a private VPN. The VPN secures my data over the network from the NIC on my system to its target; and back. I have two fundamental protections. The data is encrypted, i.e., unreadable to anyone inserting himself between my system and the network. The encrypted data goes through a VPN server, meaning that anyone on the network cannot see the originating system.¹

Communications

I have a paid account at Hushmail, which I use periodically to keep it active; but which exists primarily as a fall back, to be able to securely send encrypted mail, if needed. Hushmail provides a challenge-response mechanism for mail recipients to read their Hushmail online, via an encrypted protocol in the browser, without having to open and maintain a Hushmail account.

I have a Skype phone number and subscription for sending text messages. Skype-to-Skype calls and messages are encrypted.²

Disk Encryption

I have whole-disk encryption on my linux laptop. I used the default system that comes with Ubuntu 15.04. ³

BitLocker

In Windows, you have access to a built-in encryption technology, BitLocker. This software has some well-known issues, not least of which is an abiding mistrust of Microsoft among members of the technical community.⁴

Other free/”open source” tools exist, and so do some commercial ones. Excepting BitLocker, technical expertise and courage will be required to install them on your systems.

BestCrypt

Bruce Schneier recommends BestCrypt⁵, a commercial disk encryption system that comes in two forms. Container encryption enables the user to encrypt sections of the user space. For example, you might encrypt your documents folders, and perhaps, your porn collection. Volume encryption is the BestCrypt terminology for “whole disk encryption.” The tools are not overly expensive, but they’re not cheap, either.

DiskCryptor

DiskCryptor ⁶ started as a drop-in replacement for any of several other disk encryption packages.  One of these, TrueCrypt, has gone to the software graveyard.

Data Drifting Overhead

Of course, no musing about data integrity would be complete without contemplating the ubiquitous cloud, the mythical storage place for all out data.  In the fallout of the Snowden debacle, several prominent cloud storage providers, including Yahoo and Google, quickly made public plans to completely seal their cryptographic containers, so that government agencies could no longer help themselves. Additionally, they committed to using hashed, unrecoverable keys that could not be handed over whenever government agents went fishing.

In the event that these promises of the megacorps are insufficient, tools exist to add a user-level cryptographic layer to the floating data.

BoxCryptor

BoxCryptor is a product of a German company that encrypts files in online services like Dropbox.  Essentially, it creates a virtual drive, made up of the portion of the filesystem that is occupied by the Dropbox folder, and then encrypts the “whole disk.” The disadvantage to these services is that you are required to use the virtual drive for accessing the unencrypted files. In the case of BoxCryptor, it’s a Windows/Mac product, only, with apps for Android and iPhone.

Self-Sufficiency

One can’t escape the determined reach of a government arm.  That does not mean we can’t make it as damned difficult as possible to get a grip on us.  The various forms of media are full of yak from people talking up firearms as the answer to every problem.  A firearm will not keep government hands off your data.  A bit of self-sufficiency will. Everyone knows that the NSA has God-like powers, when turned loose upon an unsuspecting population.  But, a suspecting population can make these “data collection” operations expensive, and, eventually, unprofitable.