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Shining Truth Ministries
Technology to Stay Private and Evade Government Surveillance
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Use Linux
Linux is a free, open source operating system. It is rarely affected by viruses, spyware, or most other kinds of malware. It is also more secure than Windows and much harder to hack into. It is also much more difficult for the NSA or any other organization to put a backdoor into because all its code is viewable to everyone around the world and the code is always being revised and reviewed. The only problem is that there is a steep learning curve. Some of the more user friendly distributions (different flavors of Linux) are:​
My personal favorite Linux distro is Debian. You can see a list of some of the most popular Linux distros on Distrowatch.
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Encrypt your hard drive. Many operating systems allow you to encrypt your whole hard drive at install time. I am unfamiliar with how this is done on Windows but Debian Linux for instance allows you to encrypt your entire root partition (the top level directory on a Linux machine, kind of like C:\ on Windows). I encrypt both my laptop and my Desktop hard drives. It does not slow down the machine noticeably at all and the only inconvenience is having to type an extra passphrase at boot.
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Use OpenPGP (or GnuPG on Linux) to Encrypt Sensitive EmailsPGP/GnuPG are programs that allow you to encrypt your email in such a way that only the recipient can decode it. If you are sending an email that is highly private and you don't want the snooping eyes of the NSA reading it then send it via PGP/GnuPG. It is not foolproof but it will certainly make it much more difficult for any kind on middle man (i.e. the NSA) to see the message. One cool thing you can do to keep your emails private is steganography, which is basically hiding a message within a picture, audio, or other media file. Here is a program that does this.
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Use Tor: For private and secure web browsing there is something called Tor which stands for "The Onion Router." It is used as a proxy in your web browser so that your web traffic cannot be seen by anyone snooping between you and the website you are accessing. It can be very slow, however, and is probably not suitable for everyday web browsing, especially if you are going to look at sites that require high bandwidth, such as YouTube.
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