If you are reading this then you probably know that the new Snowden documents show that the NSA is scanning all of the major, public providers of email and internet services. This activity is without warrant, there is no consent nor due process and it is not reported. In fact, according to U.S. law if you report the activity you are subject to criminal charges. The NSA scanning harvests data that includes incredibly personal detail like address books and IM lists. The word for it is metadata. This activity is well beyond even that of PRISM, and is better defined as surveillance.

As security-guru Bruce Scheiner says,
"Metadata equals surveillance; always remember that."
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1311.html

How prevalent is this? Well, in one day the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 689,246 individual email addresses from the major providers like Gmail, Yahoo and others. The administration tells us not to worry as there are "checks and balances". The problem is that there is no due process for the "checks and balances", just some secret something in the government that decides what is legal and constitutional. This is the shady platform from which massive amounts of information about you, your family and your business, are being collected, analyzed, "interpreted" and acted upon, every day.

Besides the audacity of the activity, it's tragically recklessness. Already we have insulted the world and its leaders, much less ourselves. The damage to date is incalculable, and the potential for future damage is unfathomable. The government has unleashed the ultimate software virus and its target is you and everything about you. The virus will live forever, or at least as long as you're concerned with, and it will mutate through the hands of the hacker-mega-machine until it becomes something far from what it was originally meant to be.

Total Digital Security was founded on the notion that cybercrime is going to be a significant problem for more than just the institutional entities. We read every day about hacks into DropBox, Apple, the big banks, the Pentagon, and other entities recognizable enough to merit a story covering the breach. But, what about individuals, like us? Not so much. Why? Well, for some time we haven't been considered "high-value" targets. Whether you are a criminal syndicate, a vigilante hacker or a commercial or government entity you want bang for your hacking buck. These large, "high-value" institutional targets, are referred to as "verticals". Once you've hacked into a "vertical" the potential "value" extraction can be very high. Cyber-attacks have traditionally been focused on a "high-value", "vertical" targets in order to satisfy their agenda for any particular attack.

Yes, there are plenty of individuals and families that are victims of cyber-crime too. Some of the consequences are life-altering, all of them are damaging. Still, 99% of the press is about the institutional level crimes. One guy getting hacked by a teenager in a hoodie isn't going to make you pick up the newspaper and read the story. As cyber-criminals see it we as individuals are "horizontal" targets; broad in scope and shallow in value. Not worth their effort. Well, guess what? The game is changing and "horizontal" has just become the new "high-value" target for any hacker or spy in the game.

Let's face it, since the Snowden revelations we now know we are all victims of serious intrusions to our security and privacy. And, in that, lies the point. We have all become "high-value" targets. If you can get enough of us with anyone cyber-attack, then we're fair game. Collectively, any group of us is a "high-value" target. The safety of being bunkered in a "horizontal" is no more. Though we are not server-centric in our technology at the home and personal level, we are now vulnerable as a result of two primary forces. On one hand is the massive aggregation of individual traffic at places like Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo, among many others. And, on the other hand, is the power of "big data" software that can make sense of all that metadata. Combined, the intimate details of our everyday lives are being collected, analyzed and "interpreted". On behalf of the NSA the interpreter of your information is a secret body of unknown officials in cahoots with one another somewhere deep in the federal government that requires no due process and operates entirely in the dark. And that's when the good-guys are at work on us.

We cannot conceive of the ways this will go terribly wrong, but we can take action because there are effective and affordable solutions that are available today. You can significantly reduce the risk of cybercrime with inexpensive technology and services that effectively mitigate most all of your online risks. As a result of software the NSA and others have built along with the natural performance curve of technology, you can expect these metadata-based cyber-attacks to pick up in frequency, effectiveness and potential consequences for not just the big institutions, but for you and those around you. Digital assets are becoming more valuable by the day, witness bitcoin. Every day the value of you becoming a target goes up, and the ease of which to victimize you goes down. It's no longer "if" but "when" you or someone close to you has a serious problem with cyber-crime and the time is exactly now to get in front of it while you can.

One of the most effective things you can do to protect you and those around you is to establish Swiss-based email accounts. This slide distinguishes the reasons why:

The Benefits of a Swiss Email Account

 

 

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