You haven’t done anything wrong

You haven’t done anything wrong
Domestic Terrorist"




You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, “If

you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” The United States

doesn’t hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does

kill them.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in

a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of

data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal.

Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for

hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for

protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to

educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures,

and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent

of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment

rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal

investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house.

Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most

Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves

against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense

project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government

attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence

communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data

on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also

provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that

you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security

measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being

targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for

happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team

could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will

certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.