How to Make Your Online Communications More Secure

A June 9, 2018 article in the Washington Post "Don’t be Paul Manafort: How to make your online communications more secure" is worth reading because it highlights that there is more to communications security than just using encryption. Of course, encryption is important but if the person with whom you are communicating provides copies of your messages to the Feds, or if the government can seize unencrypted copies of your messages, then your encryption is defeated.

From the article...

Over the past week we’ve learned of two incidents in which conversations that people thought were private actually were not. In each case, two people were communicating electronically, using applications that allow for end-to-end encryption.
 
What does that mean? It means that each person’s messages were placed into locked digital envelopes that only the other person could open. As a message passed over the Internet, it couldn’t be read, unlike, say, most email messages, which move over the Internet like postcards in the postal system.

The first incident involves Paul Manafort, the chairman of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. He was indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on two new charges Friday after WhatsApp messages he had sent suggested - per prosecutors - that he was trying to persuade a third party to tell Mueller something false. WhatsApp messages have end-to-end encryption, but the government apparently gained access to them in two ways. For one, they were backed up online, the equivalent of putting photocopies of a letter in a folder at your house. For another, it seems that the person to whom the messages were being sent turned copies over to investigators.

The other recent incident involves charges filed against a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer named James A. Wolfe. Wolfe communicated with a reporter using the encrypted platform Signal - but the government appears to have found messages on his phone. In this case, it’s a bit like having the opened letter lying on your kitchen table when the police show up with a search warrant.