Your unwitting agreement to the massive collection of your personal data is a clear violation of the intent of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
But you can't be secure in your person, home, papers (or other writings) if so-called private businesses collect, sell your personal data, and collude with the government without a specific warrant from a court that defines a probable cause (a crime they believe you probably have committed) and describing exactly what they are looking for. When, however, you click "I Agree" without reading the small-print legalese terms and conditions of use for various apps and websites, they are tricking you to unwittingly let them collect your personal data. Then the government can and does issue secret subpoenas to get that info from Big Tech. This mass surveillance skirting around the Fourth Amendment violates its intent, and thus is a defacto crime committed by deceit against virtually every American on the Internet. What should you do?
Signal was created in 2018 by Signal Messenger CEO Moxie Marlinspike, the security researcher who created an encryption protocol that is used by several messaging services, including WhatsApp and Skype as well as Signal itself, and by WhatsApp founder Brian Acton who was furious when FakeBook broke their purchase agreement by changing the code in WhatsApp to enable spying on users. So these two guys created Signal, which uses your phone number. Many people think WhatsApp is secure: it was... but after Mark the SuckerBorg bought it from Brian Acton, FakeBook changed the code to store the "metadata" of your WhatsApp chats, phone and video messages in unencrypted form on its servers so that FB can scan them to build its profile on you and market you to their real customers – the advertisers and the government which can issue a secret subpoena to access it: you are the product that they sell to their real customers.
You may think that "metadata" – who you're communicating with and how often – isn't a big deal, but in intelligence analysis it's at least as important as content or moreso, by building a chart of how frequently you share with your contacts, they with theirs, and so on: your network, your whole world, then connecting all that with your and your contact's worldview from the details we share on FB and other websites. So I ditched WhatsApp when I learned this. (The same goes for Telegram, Skype, and Google's various texting and calling apps.) FB's Messenger app is even worse: it stores your chats and phone messages as well as their "metadata" in unencrypted form on its servers. FB is the most privacy-invasive of all social media: even when you're not using FB in most browsers (see Firefox below), its tracking scripts still run and can record all the sites you visit, then it combines this with whatever you've posted on FB.
From my time in military intelligence 60 years ago, and when later I became a telecomms software consultant and security specialist, I know how such tracking worked then, and it works even better now that almost everybody uses the Internet to communicate, shop, bank, and just plain surf around. A good friend who has a marketing company tells me that he can buy lists of tens of thousands of people sorted and selected by their personal data including 500 to 1,000 data points about each person: your name, address, phone number, religious and political beliefs, education, employment, age, where you travel and are located at the moment, your sexual orientation, income level, what sort of items you are searching for, where you shop and what you purchase, and many other types of very personal information.
DON'T BE SUCKERED BY THE SUCKERBORG! THE BORG SUCKS OUT YOUR BRAIN AND REPLACES IT WITH DIGITAL MUCK. THEN THE BORG WEIGHS, MEASURES, PACKAGES, LABELS YOU LIKE A PIECE OF MEAT, AND SELLS YOU TO ITS REAL CUSTOMERS, THE ADVERTISERS! YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!
The Atlantic – by no definition a right-wing mouthpiece – ran the article "FACEBOOK IS A DOOMSDAY MACHINE" in its December 15, 2020 issue – "Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to 'give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.' Instead, it took the concept of 'community' and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That's because Facebook – along with Google and YouTube – is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide – a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California. ... No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world's population – and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do." Read this article – Hillary Clinton had nothing good to say about Mark the SuckerBorg.
In "Delta Quadrant," one of the Startrek series, we were introduced to "The Borg" – a "cybernetic life form" that is part-computer and part-human, but the computer dominates: "The Borg have a singular goal, namely the consumption of technology, rather than wealth or political expansion as most species seek.
"According to their spokesman, in the form of an assimilated Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Borg only want to 'raise the quality of life' of the species they 'assimilate.' ... Androids, for example, they view as primitive and obsolete. Born humanoid, they are almost immediately implanted with bio-chips that link their brains to a collective consciousness via a unique subspace frequency emitted by each drone" (Borg). If this sounds eerily like a blending of Orwell's 1984 "Groupthink" and FakeBook, it's because it is.
So SECOND: Adopt the following steps one-by-one, because I realize you can't do them all at once. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Switch to the no-tracking Brave browser, using it as your default browser for most of your surfing – it uses much less memory than Firefox (see below). Roland Eich, the person who headed Mozilla where Firefox comes from, was fired because he supported a conservative political proposition, so he started Brave. Brave on my PC has blocked 29,573 trackers and ads in the past month, saving me 25 minutes by not loading them. Recommend this browser to your contacts too: both Brave and Firefox are built on the Chromium browser engine so they work very much like the Chrome browser but with no tracking. You can install Brave and Firefox on Windows, Android, iPhone, MacOS, and Linux. (On our Chromebooks, because Chrome is built into the operating system and other browsers just won't work well, we use the DuckDuckGo search engine and browser extension to stop Chrome and websites from tracking us.) The Firefox browser includes an extension which limits FakeBook tracker bugs. Switch to Brave from Microsoft's Edge browser, Apple's Safari browser, or Google's Chrome browser (see the WIRED magazine article "It's time to ditch Chrome").
Recently I finished reading Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier – also in no way a right-wing nutcase – who documents the increase of Big Tech's and government's filtering the news you get. Schneier is a cryptographer, "one of the world's foremost security experts" (Wired magazine), a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy, and on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One item he mentioned is that when WiFi routers began to be mass-produced about 20 years ago, the manufacturers adapted an off-the-shelf version of Linux for the routers' software, and it's still being used today although by now about 20 or 30 known but unpatched security bugs have been discovered in it. This means hackers can exploit these bugs, get into your WiFi network and then into your computer and/or smartphone. With the eavesdropping, canceling of accounts, and/or shadow-banning the communications of Christians and conservatives taking place today, I've decided to share my personal experience and expertise as well:
You may have heard that PragerU has been banned from YouTube, the comedian Adam Corolla has been blacklisted, as has the Christian satire site Babylon Bee: they posted a satirical piece that CNN denounced as "fake news" (it wasn't news at all, it was satire, folks!) so Snopes flagged it as "untrue" giving Big Tech an excuse to ban them. Left-wing organizations are applying pressure on networks and hosting companies to cancel Christian and conservative speech. CBS and the Hallmark Channel banned this pro-life Susan B. Anthony List's ad, after having contracted with the group to run the ad: obviously left-wing pressure was applied. Also banned from YouTube and FakeBook are several other Christian and conservative sites such as the pro-life website LifeSite News that was kicked off FB for going against "community standards” (that is, against neo-pagan immorality) – they've also been banished from Twitter and Google Analytics, which drastically reduced LifeSite's income from running ads. Google won't allow me to create a YouTube video channel because I don't conform to "community standards.” And I've seen my Hosken-News Blog on Google's Blogspot be shadow-banned, resulting in an 80% drop in visits ever since the 2020 election season was gearing up. Big Tech wants to control the narrative, to allow people to only see, hear, and read a socialist-materialist "scientific" worldview, and if you resist you'll be silenced: shunned, fired, shadow-banned, or cancelled.
THIRD: don't let Big Tech and Big Media control what you see, hear, and read – then the socialist-materialists can control what you think. Did you know that 52% of Americans get their news from FakeBook? So balance what you get from network TV news, FB, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and the MSM (Main-Stream Media) that fill your mind with one-sided leftist mush, and compare it to Daily Signal or Townhall for world and national news from a conservative viewpoint, or The Stream for commentary from a Christian perspective. For reading and posting, exercising your right to free, uncensored speech on social media USA.life, MeWe.com, Gettr.com, Codias.com, and Gab.com (includes TV!). Then ask your contacts on FakeBook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to join the migration to these more balanced Christian and conservative social media sites. But beware of Parler and Rumble – they are false-flag operations funded by liberals.
Set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine in your Brave browser. It doesn't track your searches or build a profile on you, it displays unbiased results based only on what your current search is for. In contrast to Startpage, DuckDuckGo does its own searches, whereas Startpage uses Google search results and simply removes the tracking bugs. But Google's (and Startpage's) search results are highly biased: try searching for "Arizona election audit" in Google and Startpage compared to DuckDuckGo: a vast difference! Also, don't click on links on websites or in emails from organizations or people you don't know and trust: Bruce Schneier says this is the most frequent way that hackers get access to your computer, steal passwords, and/or encrypt your files and hold your computer hostage for ransom. He writes - "Google looked at Gmail users from mid-2016 to mid-2017 and found 12 million successful phishing attacks every week." Imagine that: 12 million successful account hacks per week! And most people are totally unaware of these attacks, even after they happen to them.
It's not just businesses that are getting hacked and having to pay millions of dollars ransom to decrypt their files: just last week as I write this, a life-long good friend of mine clicked on a link to "renew his Norton antivirus" and was tricked into allowing access to his bank. He almost lost $45,000 from his bank accounts, but just in time realized it was a scam. The hackers, however, installed malware on his PC and changed his PIN so he couldn't get into his computer, so he had to pay his trusted local computer technicians to unlock and remove the malware from his PC. This week, we learned that another good friend, a neighbor, just had her identity stolen. Never post publicly your full name, place and date of birth – hackers can use that info to generate your Social Security number successfully in most cases, then steal your identity.
You should also get ProtonMail.com, a 500Mb account with free ProtonVPN or a 5Gb account with a faster ProtonVPN for $4/month. They offer an end-to-end encrypted email system based in Switzerland. It is open-source code, which guarantees it won't plant malware or track you. Your messages are encrypted before leaving your computer or smartphone, so not even ProtonMail can read them. Bear in mind, however, that the header (Metadata) of your email sent from ProtonMail to another email server must be in plain text so the Internet knows where to send it, but emails between two ProtonMail users is fully encrypted, like Signal text messages. You can set it up to pick up your old Gmail, Yahoo, etc. account into your new Proton account, or you can keep it separate from your unsecured email accounts. You can use a "xyz@protonmail.com" or "xyz@pm.me" email address ("pm.me" means "private-mail me" and is also an abbreviation for ProtonMail). Remember: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook webmail, etc. are not "free" – you are the product – it's your personal profile they are selling to their real customers, the advertisers! Also, Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are now allowed to sell your email "metadata" and browsing data to advertisers.
What about your password vault? What, you're not even using a password vault? Do you use "qwerty" or "password" or "123456" – the same password on all websites? No-o-o-o!! Those are the first things hackers will try. Do you write your passwords on note paper and stuck it on your monitor, under your keyboard, or put in your billfold? I can't tell you how many times people I've helped set up email accounts later came back and told me they had lost their passwords that they had written down on a piece of paper. So I helped them set up an online, encrypted password vault, memorizing just one master password to store all their other passwords in encrpted form: not even the providers of these services can read your passwords. Avoid the password-keepers in your browser because if you lose your phone or change to a different browser, your passwords are gone.
For years, I had been using LastPass that generates an unbreakable password for each of your websites and stores them encrypted online. But it's so automatic that it inserts your login and password at websites and logging you back in after you've logged out. And recently, the free version of LastPass changed so that it would only run on one device. Also, a review mentioned that some of the off-the-shelf code modules Lastpass uses may have been compromised to include spyware. (This bugging the supply-chain of standard code and microchips is called "poisoning the well" – infecting chips and modules that are used by thousands of hardware and software developers.) These three issues led me to ditch Lastpass, and I found Bitwarden, a commercial-grade password vault that is also open-source code. Bitwarden's free version will work on all the big-name browsers on your PC, Chromebook, smartphone, and tablet. My wife and I are using it on six devices now, sharing the same passwords in one Bitwarden account.
In Bruce Schneier's latest book, Click Here to Kill Everybody, he also writes that our modern "IoT" (Internet-of Things) with everything connected – our car, toaster, doorbell, refrigerator, home security system, home thermostat, etc. – our entire infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. Get his free monthly newsletter – “Schneier on Security.” Our very lives depend on our Internet-connected computer systems. Schneier's warnings went unheeded, thus the Solarwinds "supply chain" attack by infecting a software module used by thousands of businesses, infiltrating hundreds of U.S. government computer systems and thousands of businesses including Microsoft and its millions of customers.
Then we saw over half of the U.S. East Coast's gasoline supply and 40% of U.S. meat supply held hostage for $15 million in ransomware. Banks are shutting down hundreds of branches because most people do all their banking online, but then can be hacked. Thousands of hospitals, banks, small and large businesses as well as millions of private individuals have been hacked and had to pay ransoms because they didn't have sufficient backups. And now a Russian hacking group called "REvil" has pulled off another "supply chain" attack: Hacking Attack Likely Hit Thousands of New Targets – "The incident may have infected as many as 40,000 computers world-wide, according to cybersecurity experts."
I have two master's theses, my doctoral dissertation, and 25 years of website code: 22,000+ website files on my hard drive, so I use Veracrypt to encrypt and back up my files offline daily: you should too! Or at least, use the free 15-gigabyte "cloud" backups from Google or Microsoft. I do that as well. But if you rely on just one backup in "the cloud," on a DVD or flash drive, keep in mind that it can be corrupted or lost: a 2007conference we were to attend in Holland almost didn't happen because the organizer was storing all his plans and contact info of invitees on a flash drive that got corrupted. He very painstakingly reconstructed most of the data, thankfully, and we were able to attend the conference. But I could tell you how close friends have lost decades of photos of weddings, children growing up, etc. stored only on a hard drive or DVD, etc. that got corrupted or lost: gone forever. My hard drive has crashed twice and once was infected with a computer virus (by a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, no less!), but I was able to recover from backups. Don't you learn this lesson the hard way!
Another reason to back up your files is to save versions of your files. Most backup software will save the last 25 or so versions, so if one of your files gets corrupted or you just want to recover what you had written earlier, you can restore an earlier version. A related issue is "link rot" – a web page that you linked to for a blog post, term paper, thesis, etc. disappears from the Internet or is altered so that the point you had made by quoting it is no longer supported. I often modify newsletters, blog articles and even theses that I've already posted on the Internet, correcting typos and unclear syntax: this is with good intent and beneficial. But sometimes, web pages are altered for malicious intent. A second Atlantic article, "The Internet is Rotting," describes how Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito based his decision on a certain case by linkng to a source on the Internet that had later been hacked. What does this mean for our system of laws? And links I've referred to "go dead" – the Atlantic article above tells us that about 75% of links 15 years old are "dead links." What does this mean for our leaky "vast storehouse of knowledge" that is the Internet? For my last thesis, I downloaded and backed up the digital resources that I quoted, just in case those links"go dead." And eventually most will. Back up your files!
And finally, get Software Policy, a program that prevents such unknown software from running at non-standard locations until you unlock it by entering the administrator password. You should not only do your day-to-day computer work in a standard user account, logging into the administrator account only when necessary: you also need a way to keep unknown software from running when clicking on a web link (yes, just a simple click can give hackers permission to install malware!), or running from a CD-Rom or DVD-Rom, or when inserting a USB drive. These are methods used by spyware, ransomware, and malware to install themselves without your knowledge or permission, taking over your computer. I've been using Software Policy for years on my own PCs and have installed it at a computer lab where young people come to download and run computer games – the most notorious source of malware. It can also block access to any risky or porno websites. Get it.
I hope this helps!
Addendum:
I had installed Telegram to try it out: Telegram messages are stored on their "cloud" servers and they are not end-to-end encrypted by default, but if you turn on encryption, those encrypted messages usually are secure. Telegram, however, lets outside developers write AI "bots" that can interact with users and groups on Telegram. Usually, these bots are benign but some might have malware hidden in them that can read your messages or even take over your phone. So I ditched Telegram because it's not truly secure.
About Skype: it offers all the same features as Signal – chat, voice and video calling, file sharing, etc. But as of 2018, Skype offers end-to-end encryption only if you use the "Private Conversation" feature. To start a Private Conversation, select "New Private Conversation" from the compose menu or the recipient's profile. The recipient will receive an invite, and all calls and messages in that conversation will be encrypted end-to-end until the conversation is terminated. Normally, text, voice/video and attachments are encrypted between users, but stored unencrypted on Microsoft's servers and along with metadata they must be shared with government on demand.
Why use Signal? The above kind of surveillance is also true for Google Chat, Meet, Voice, and Messages. Duo and Hangouts have changed over to Meet for video-via-Meet and Chat for texting. You must now install the new Chat app on your Android phone, Chromebook, and/or PC. To replace Hangouts with Chat and Meet in Gmail on a computer:
1) Click on the "gear" icon in the upper right corner of the Gmail screen,
2) then click on "See all settings,"
3) then click on "Chat and Meet" and select "Chat."
Texts via Chat show your Google Voice number to the called person and calls show that # in their phone's history. Keep in mind: these apps are all unsecured. Also, the texting function in Google Chat is separate from the texting function in Google Voice, they are not synced. And they're both separate from Google's Messages & Meet video calling: six apps doing various parts of what Signal does in one app – is that confusing, or what?!