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Chatting in Secret While We're All Being Watched

posted by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @06:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the instant-paranoia dept.

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with a link to a comprehensive secure instant messaging communication guide at The Intercept. It covers Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Android, primarily using the Jabber/XMPP chat protocol and Tor Browser for configuring a Jabber account over the Web without accidentally leaking your identity.

When you pick up the phone and call someone, or send a text message, or write an email, or send a Facebook message, or chat using Google Hangouts, other people find out what you're saying, who you're talking to, and where you're located. Such private data might only be available to the service provider brokering your conversation, but it might also be visible to the telecom companies carrying your Internet packets, to spy and law enforcement agencies, and even to some nearby teenagers monitoring your Wi-Fi network with Wireshark.

But if you take careful steps to protect yourself, it's possible to communicate online in a way that's private, secret and anonymous. Today I'm going to explain in precise terms how to do that. I'll take techniques NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden used when contacting me two and a half years ago and boil them down to the essentials. In a nutshell, I'll show you how to create anonymous real-time chat accounts and how to chat over those accounts using an encryption protocol called Off-the-Record Messaging, or OTR.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DarkMorph on Friday July 17 2015, @09:47PM

    by DarkMorph (674) on Friday July 17 2015, @09:47PM (#210617)
    Off-the-Record [cypherpunks.ca] - library and reference on the Pidgin plugin as well
    ChatSecure [guardianproject.info] - Mobile app that implements OTR; compatible with any other XMPP client using OTR namely Pidgin
    SMSSecure [smssecure.org] - Mobile app to replace Android's native SMS application. Allows transceiving encrypted SMS texts.

    All the above software is open source, and the mobile applications can be obtained via F-Droid [f-droid.org]. (ChatSecure is now listed under the GuardianProject's repo [guardianproject.info].)
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  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:23AM

    by captain normal (2205) on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:23AM (#210687)

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    --
    Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:32AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:32AM (#210717) Journal

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      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.