On May 20, 2013, Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong to meet with journalists.
   Just short of a year before, President Obama denied that the NSA was spying on all of us.

  Up until that point the idea of mass domestic surveillance was still the stuff of conspiracy theories and the government could get away with official denials.
No matter what your personal opinion of Snowden, he changed all that.

  Here is the Daily Show take on NSA lies.
   I would like to present a list of government lies that they have been caught in regarding the NSA spying.

#1) “… NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), said August 23.

Oops!

 “I am reviewing each of these incidents in detail,” Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, said in a statement, after the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg News yesterday that some analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans.

#2) “The ongoing national dialogue is not about your performance. The NSA/CSS work force has executed its national security responsibilities with equal and full respect for civil liberties and privacy.”
 - NSA chief Keith Alexander, June 25

Oops!

 The NSA promptly violated those rules — “since the earliest days” of the program’s 2006 inception — carrying out thousands of inquiries on phone numbers without any of the court-ordered screening designed to protect Americans from illegal government surveillance.
   The violations continued for three years, until they were uncovered by an internal review, and the NSA found itself fighting to keep the spy program alive.

#3 “The government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for this program unless there is an appropriate and documented foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition, such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities or nuclear proliferation.”
  - Attorney General Eric Holder, June 15
#3 Part 2 “Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.”
  - President Obama, August 5

Oops!

 “Indeed, the record before this court establishes that NSA’s acquisition of internet transactions likely results in NSA acquiring annually tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications, and tens of thousands of non-target communications of persons who have little or no relationship to the target but who are protected under the Fourth Amendment.”

#4 From the March 12, 2013 testimony:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon): “So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper: “No, sir.”

#5 “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany, So lives have been saved.”
  - President Obama, June
#5 Part 2 “Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe—saving real lives. This isn’t a game. This is real.”
 - Representative Mike Rogers, July

Oops!

 An analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”
   The study, to be released Monday, corroborates the findings of a White House-appointed review group, which said last month that the NSA counterterrorism program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that much of the evidence it did turn up “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.”

And then Snowden happened

Edward Snowden received another human rights award in Berlin. He was awarded a human rights award from Sweden earlier.
   However, none of those awards show the effect Snowden has had on the world like this survey.

 An international survey of Internet users has found that more than 39% have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of spying revelations by one-time NSA employee Edward Snowden.

Guardian Edward Snowden revelations have had limited effect on privacy
 NY Times Americans Relatively Sanguine About Online Privacy, Study Says
ARS Most people have heard of Snowden, few have changed habits as a result
The Hill Many concerned over online privacy, but few acting for security
International Business Times Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users

  You would think from reading those headlines that no one but a few "civil rights nuts" care about mass domestic spying. Bruce Schneier exposes just how ridiculous those headlines are.

 He's having an enormous impact. I ran the actual numbers country by country, combining data on Internet penetration with data from this survey. Multiplying everything out, I calculate that 706 million people have changed their behavior on the Internet because of what the NSA and GCHQ are doing.
  Note that the countries in this survey only cover 4.7 billion out of a total 7 billion world population. Taking the conservative estimates that 20% of the remaining population uses the Internet, 40% of them have heard of Snowden, and 25% of those have done something about it, that's an additional 46 million people around the world.

 When have you ever heard of 3/4 of a Billion people changing their habits on anything short of an ebola pandemic?
   The news media is laughably complicit here.

It was revealed that a senior executive at the NSA argued that the NSA's mass domestic spying program was not justified.

 Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn't providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.
  But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency's recent history.

In other words, it was a political decision, not one based on the best intelligence practices.
 Instead the NSA targeted domestic political activists with no ties or connections to terrorist groups. You know, exactly like the pro-fourth Amendment groups said they were doing.
   In fact, of the countless records the NSA holds 9 out of 10 were not NSA targets, and around half of them are Americans.

  And that was just the start.

 In the first half-year of his leaks, the public learned about the NSA’s monitoring of citizens’ phone calls and email, and routine spying on allied foreign governments and companies. Later details emerged about GCHQ’s bulk collection of Yahoo webcam chats, the NSA’s mass storage of phone conversations and metadata in target countries, NSA facial recognition databases that pull images from cable taps and border crossings, and even automated NSA programs that have the ability to infect millions of systems worldwide with spying software — something the agency itself called “industrial-scale exploitation.”

Here's how the public attitude toward Snowden has changed:

Newsweek

 The survey found that 55 percent of respondents think Snowden did the right thing in exposing PRISM, the mass data-mining program, while another 29 percent believe he was in the wrong, and 16 percent endorse neither statement. Of Snowden’s supporters, 80 percent said he exposed constitutional violations.

Fox News

  The poll asks voters to set aside how they feel about Snowden and his crime, and simply consider whether they are glad the information was made public.  By a 68-25 percent margin, voters say yes, they are glad to know how these programs affect Americans like them.

Most Republicans (69 percent), independents (68 percent) and Democrats (68 percent) are pleased to be aware of the NSA’s activities.  Among those part of the tea party movement, 75 percent are glad.

Kill the messenger

The defenders of the status quo have a simple formula for whistleblowers: destroy the messenger.
   Snowden is a hypocrite.
  Snowden is a whiner.
  Snowden is a grandiose narcissist.
  Snowden is like George Zimmerman.
  Snowden has no integrity.
  Snowden can't be trusted.

   And that was just for starters.
After that the really Big Guns came out.

   Dick Cheney declared last year that Edward Snowden was a traitor.
  So did former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and former National Security Agency and CIA head Michael Hayden.

A new independent investigation has revealed that terrorist jihadist groups were unimpressed by Snowden's revelations.

The analysis by Flashpoint Global Partners, a private security firm, examined the frequency of releases and updates of encryption software by jihadi groups and mentions of encryption in jihadi social media forums to assess the impact of Snowden’s information. It found no correlation in either measure to Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s surveillance techniques, which became public beginning June 5, 2013...
   “Nothing has changed about the encryption methodologies that they use,” he said. “It’s difficult to reconcile with the claim that they have dramatically improved their encryption technology since Snowden.”

This reports directly contradicts claims by politicians and talking heads in the media that claim that Snowden's leaks have damaged our security by alerting terrorist groups that were somehow unaware they were being spied upon.

 Speaking on “Meet the Press”on Jan. 19, Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Michigan), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said the Snowden leaks led al Qaeda to change its tactics. “[Y]ou have to remember, al Qaeda has changed the way they communicate based on this,” said Rogers. “That puts our soldiers at risk in the field. That’s a real dangerous consequence.”
   Nicholas Rasmussen, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified last week before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that, as a result of leaks by Snowden and others, “Terrorists now understand the scope and scale of Western collection capabilities, and they’re changing the way they communicate. They’re adopting encryption technologies. They’re shifting accounts, or avoiding altogether the use of electronic communications, all of which frustrate our counterterrorism efforts.”

 Director of National Intelligence, and Famous Liar, James Clapper, echoed many of these same claims just yesterday.

 Edward Snowden’s national security leaks have created a “perfect storm” degrading the intelligence community’s capabilities, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday.

 Snowden's critics have engaged in the most extreme hyperbole. Accusing him of aiding the rise of ISIS and assisting the Russian occupation of Crimea.

  The new independent report says there is no evidence that this is true, and that the jihadists were well aware of the importance of encryption because they were already being spied upon.

What Snowden probably didn't take into account was all the money involved.
Spying on the public shouldn't be profitable, but it is.

 The National Security Agency (NSA), which develops surveillance tools that are both dazzling and terrifying, has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades.
    It's called the Technology Transfer Program (TTP), under which the NSA declassifies some of its technologies that it developed for previous operations, patents them, and, if they're swayed by an American company's business plan and nondisclosure agreements, rents them out.
   The TTP itself isn't classified, though 2014 is the first year they've published a formal catalog. (Yes, there's a catalog.) Nor is it unique to the NSA. The Department of Defense (DoD), which includes the NSA under its umbrella, has a number of branches with similar programs.

 It's not that some of the technologies aren't useful and can even in some cases benefit the nation or the public. The problem is that the industry has a natural tendency toward abuses.
   Do we really want an agency with a history of constitutional and civil rights abuses to be fiscally self-sufficient?

  The profits from domestic spying go beyond just the NSA.

About 70 percent of the national intelligence budgets are spent on the private sector, as much as $6 Billion a year just for the NSA.

 One of NSA’s most important contractors may be Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing that makes a key telecommunications software that allows government agencies and corporations to monitor huge amounts of data flowing over fiber-optic cables. According to Bill Binney, one of four NSA whistle-blowers who’ve been warning about NSA’s immense powers, one Narus device can analyze 1,250,000 1,000-character emails every second. That comes to over 100 billion emails a day...
  Another major presence at NSA’s Business Park is SAIC. Like Booz, it stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry. Of its 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it one of the largest private intelligence services in the world.

 In the world of Washington, companies that live off of taxpayer contracts are also some of the largest political compaign contributors.

The Forever War on Some Terror has now expanded to included ISIS. While most of this war will be fought with bombs being dropped, the NSA will also be gaining a new revenue source.

 A massive, $7.2 billion Army intelligence contract signed just 10 days ago underscores the central role to be played by the National Security Agency and its army of private contractors in the unfolding air war being carried out by the United States and its Gulf States allies against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
  “Army INSCOM supports NSA very heavily,” Tony Shaffer, a former Army intelligence officer, who worked at the command from 1991 to 1995, told Salon. While he was stationed in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, Shaffer said, “Every mission I ran outside the wire was pretty much supported by INSCOM, which is NSA’s ground collector.”

  It isn't just the agency itself. It's also the executives that works there. For instance, former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command and Famous Liar Keith Alexander has started his own security consulting firm.

 To capitalize on his recent departure from military intelligence—Alexander retired in March following months of revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—the general is offering his security expertise to the banking industry for the fire sale price of $600,000 per month after first asking for $1 million. There are threats everywhere, Alexander warns, and “It would be devastating if one of our major banks was hit, because they’re so interconnected.”
   That may be, but Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) is suspicious that Alexander has anything useful to offer at that price—unless, that is, he’s peddling national security secrets.

What you can do to protect yourself

During any online debate regarding the NSA mass domestic spying, someone will likely declare that you can't defend yourself from the government, and that the only solution is to simply self-censor (aka the "I don't have anything to hide" defense).
   Well that simply isn't true.

 In nine cases in 2013, state police were unable to break the encryption used by criminal suspects they were investigating, according to an annual report on law enforcement eavesdropping released by the U.S. court system on Wednesday. That’s more than twice as many cases as in 2012, when police said that they’d been stymied by crypto in four cases—and that was the first year they’d ever reported encryption preventing them from successfully surveilling a criminal suspect. Before then, the number stood at zero.

Before someone comes out and says, "This is bad because bad guys are getting away with something," remember that America's intelligence agencies like to spy on human rights groups and environmentalists, just to name a few.

  In fact, people that are concerned with their privacy, people who are most likely to use encryption, are some of those being targeted for that reason.

There is a lot of contradictory information about what works and what doesn't work when it comes to protecting your privacy on the internet. Fortunately there is a source of information that can be trusted.
Der SPIEGEL recently analyzed Snowden's leaked NSA documents and this is what they found.

Make no mistake - the NSA considers encryption as a threat. One internal NSA document says, "Did you know that ubiquitous encryption on the Internet is a major threat to NSA's ability to prosecute digital-network intelligence (DNI) traffic or defeat adversary malware?"
Monitoring a document's path is considered "trivial." Recording Facebook chats is a "minor" task. Nevertheless there are several technologies that are difficult or impossible for the NSA to crack.

What works

Tor: This appears to be the only proven way of maintaining anonymity on the internet.

 Tor, otherwise known as The Onion Router, is free and open source software that allows users to surf the web through a network of more than 6,000 linked volunteer computers. The software automatically encrypts data in a way that ensures that no single computer in the network has all of a user's information. For surveillance experts, it becomes very difficult to trace the whereabouts of a person who visits a particular website or to attack a specific person while they are using Tor to surf the Web.

Truecrypt: If you are afraid of a spy agency (or hackers) ever getting ahold of your computer, it appears that you can indeed make it crack-proof.

 The NSA also has "major" problems with Truecrypt, a program for encrypting files on computers.

Off-the-Record (OTR):

 A protocol called Off-the-Record (OTR) for encrypting instant messaging in an end-to-end encryption process also seems to cause the NSA major problems...Transcripts of intercepted chats using OTR encryption handed over to the intelligence agency by a partner in Prism -- an NSA program that accesses data from at least nine American internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple -- show that the NSA's efforts appear to have been thwarted in these cases: "No decrypt available for this OTR message."

ZRTP: I've been meaning to try out Signal.

 ZRTP, which is used to securely encrypt conversations and text chats on mobile phones, is used in free and open source programs like RedPhone and Signal. "It's satisfying to know that the NSA considers encrypted communication from our apps to be truly opaque," says RedPhone developer Moxie Marlinspike.

Pretty Good Privacy(PGP): It's amazing that after all these years, GnuPGP is still rock-solid encryption.

 PGP is more than 20 years old, but apparently it remains too robust for the NSA spies to crack. "No decrypt available for this PGP encrypted message," a further document viewed by SPIEGEL states of emails the NSA obtained from Yahoo...One document shows that the Five Eyes intelligence services sometimes use PGP themselves.