Secure Your Communications

 

U.S. Justice Louis Brandeis called privacy "the right to be left alone;" the concept that one's personal information is protected from public scrutiny. Having a secure means of communication is essential to preserving our privacy rights and safeguarding our civil liberties.

 

The following programs and applications all provide good security for your on-line communications. I encourage you to review each of these programs adopt the ones that meet your needs.

 

Signal - https://signal.org

Tox - https://tox.chat
Wire - https://wire.com/en/
Wickr https://www.wickr.com/personal/
GnuPG - https://www.gnupg.org
Ring - https://ring.cx
ProtonMail - https://protonmail.com
Tutanota - https://tutanota.com
Jitsi - https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/



If you are serious about protecting your private communications, you will probably end up using more than one of these programs. To have secure communications it is necessary that everyone is using the same communication protocol (i.e. everyone chats on Wire, or everyone sends e-mail between ProtonMail accounts). As your number of contacts who use secure communications increases, you may find that not everyone has chosen the use program or application. In this case it will be necessary to agree upon a secure means of communication. Having several secure communications possibilities available, and being familiar with how these programs work, can make it easier to quickly establish a secure communication channel. Finally, while I believe that each of the above programs provides very good security, it is possible that any one of them could be compromised somehow in the future. In this case having redundant secure communications channels allows you to continue to protect your private communications.