Here's how to best secure your data now that the NSA can crack almost any encryption

The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government’s behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security “exploitable,” and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.

To some extent, it’s not surprising to hear that the U.S. spy agency is doing spy agency stuff but, given the recent surveillance revelations and the fact that other countries likely have similar capabilities, the news is certainly worrying. To make matters worse, it came just a day after Pew reported that 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance in some way.

All is not lost, however. While the stunning reports failed to name exactly which companies and encryption technologies have been compromised by the NSA, you can minimize the chances that your encrypted communications will be cracked by the government—or anyone else. Read on.

Now that we know that corporations—or at least individuals in corporations—have worked with the NSA to build backdoors into encryption technology, privacy buffs should give commercial encryption technology (such as Microsoft’s BitLocker) the hairy eye.

NSA headquarters.

You’re better off using tools that employ open-source or public-domain encryption methods, as they need to work with every vendor’s software and, in the case of open-source encryption, can be scrutinized for potential security flaws.

With that in mind, here are some tools worth checking out:

Truecrypt for encrypting sensitive files, folders, and entire drives on your PC.GPG, an open-source implementation of the OpenPGP protocol used to encrypt email communications. Be sure to read up on why standard-compliant email messages can never truly be secure, though.TAILS, a.k.a. The (Amnesic) Incognito Live System, a Linux distribution built with security and anonymity in mind. TAILS comes packed with numerous privacy and encryption tools baked in, including Tor, which allows you to browse the web (mostly) anonymously and access a Darknet of so-called “Hidden Services” that grant anonymity to both web servers and web browsers. Bruce Schneier—a longtime security guru who has actually read the documents detailing the NSA’s encryption-busting methods—recommends using Tor and Hidden Services to thwart NSA surveillance. TAILS is meant to be used as a live CD, which means you can boot it from a disc or USB drive, and your data is wiped when you power off your system.Off-the-record messaging, or OTR, a cryptographic protocol for encrypting and authenticating instant-messaging communications. The protocol uses AES and SHA-1 standards and comes baked into TAILS and is recommended by Schneier even in the wake of the NSA revelations. Here’s a list of IM software that supports OTR.

Proprietary encryption tools created overseas may—may—also be less likely to have installed NSA-friendly backdoors into their software. This morning, I received an email from Boxcryptor, the superb (and Germany-based) cloud-storage encryption tool, reassuring me that there is no way for the company to snoop on its customers, as it encrypts files using private RSA security keys stored only on users’ private PCs, then transmits the already-encrypted files using HTTPs.

Beyond encryption, most of the advice in PCWorld’s How to protect your PC from Prism surveillance still applies. Note, however, that the New York Times report on the NSA’s crypto-cracking abilities suggest that VPN technology and the ever-popular SSL web protocol have been two encryption methods particularly targeted by the government. (Schneier suggests using TLS and IPsec whenever possible on the web-communication front.)

Even so, using the tips in that article will make your browsing much more secure in general, not just the NSA or foreign governments.

Also check out PCWorld’s guide to encrypting (almost) everything, which is chock full of handy-dandy encryption tips, though many rely on proprietary—not open-source—technology. While closed-source solutions may not protect against The Man and his super-encryption-cracking eyes, they’ll help keep everyone else out of your business.

Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils.
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PAX 2013: Here's all the news that's worth your time

PAX Prime, the Comic-Con of the video game industry, occurred this past weekend in Seattle. This year’s event was a massive four-day undertaking that spanned the Labor Day weekend, with tens of thousands of fans crammed into the labyrinthine Washington State Convention Center.

For many, this was an opportunity to play the year's most anticipated games or lay hands on the upcoming Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. If you were expecting any big news about the next generation of home consoles at PAX proper, however, Sony and Microsoft were happy to disappoint you.

Still, there were a few notable announcements scattered between the constant Titanfall hype and Twitch streamers. In the next few days (once we get some sleep) we’ll also have a rundown of some of the fantastic games—big and small—we saw in Seattle.

For now, here’s all the news you need to know from PAX 2013.

On Saturday Keiji Inafune announced he’s working on a spiritual successor to the franchise that made him famous: the revered Mega Man.

Known as Mighty No. 9, this is a Mega Man game in everything but name: difficult platforming, 2D-esque art style, and quick combat. Punishing, in other words. The team over at developer Comcept features an “all-star team” of ex-Mega Man devs, so hopefully this will bring some of the magic back to Inafune’s robot-battling formula.

The man who helped make Mega Man is working on a new game called Mighty No. 9.

The team launched a Kickstarter for the game during Inafune's PAX panel on Saturday, August 31, and by the end of the long weekend the game had already blasted past its $900,000 funding goal.

Now if only Mighty No. 9 had an entire rock opera to its name.

Gearbox, developer of Borderlands and…well, some other not-as-great-as-Borderlands games, revealed it’s currently developing two new franchises for upcoming consoles.

Let’s just hope they’re better than Aliens: Colonial Marines. Or at least Duke Nukem Forever.

And while not strictly news, there were a number of events during PAX to commemorate fallen industry figure Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb, who passed away in July.

The video game industry continues to mourn the loss of beloved raconteur Ryan Davis.

At the Giant Bomb panel on Saturday night, fans showed their support with a three-minute standing ovation at the start of the show. Then on Sunday night the Cards Against Humanity panel paid tribute to the man, with friends offering video and spoken memories of Davis. Highly recommended viewing if you followed Davis’s work in either the GameSpot or Giant Bomb days.

Sitting in 2K’s booth, playing XCOM: Enemy Within behind closed doors, my eardrums suddenly rang with the sound of an overenthusiastic announcer shouting, “Ultimate Warrior is in the building!” (or something along those lines).

I turned to the developer talking me through XCOM. “…the real Ultimate Warrior?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking bemused. Ultimate Warrior showed up at PAX just to hawk the latest wrestling game, WWE 2K14.

I’d offer you visual proof of this momentous occasion in gaming history, but the larger-than-life legend that is the Ultimate Warrior asked that we not take pictures and I reluctantly obliged.

On Friday Sony announced the formation of a new production team that will help developers bring their games to Playstation hardware. This Third Party Production team will work alongside the extant PlayStation Third Party Relations group to "bring [our partners'] beloved IPs to some new places," according to a Playstation Blog post from Third Party Production leader Gio Corsi.

Sony is fielding more teams to assist developers in bringing games like Borderlands 2 to new Playstation platforms.

It's a vague mission statement, to be sure, but it suggests that this team will help Sony deliver on their promise to make "nearly every" game developed for the Playstation 4 playable on the Playstation Vita. We already know that Third Party Production is working to port games from third-party developers like Gearbox across multiple Playstation platforms, as Sony confirmed that the team is already working on bringing Borderlands 2 to the Playstation Vita.

And…that’s the news from PAX. Light for sure, though we did get our hands on dozens of independent and not-so-independent games. We’ll have information on those in the coming days, so stick around.

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