Protecting your emails from prying eyes

This is a little off topic but as we’ve seen down the last couple of months, there are many governments who want to collect your emails, web searches, Skype and phone calls. As I was strolling around the web, I saw an article by Kaspersky giving you a tip on how to encrypt your Gmail emails in your browser using a chrome plug-in.  It would be a great suggestion, until you realise that Microsoft gave the NSA access to its users Outlook and Hotmail pre encrypted data and Google owns Chrome.

So, if you are feeling the urge to keep your email contents secure, the best way is to use a stand alone encryption tool.  You don’t need to send secret passwords, all you need to do is make sure your recipient has created a public key.  One of the easiest to use I’ve found (and none of them are as simple as typing and sending) is The GNU Privacy Guard.

It’s pretty straightforward to set up.

• Download and install GnuPG
• Create a folder somewhere to save your keys
• Create your key and your passphrase
• Get the key of the person you want to write to
• Create a text file in your folder and copy the key into it
• Load their key into GnuPG

To encrypt a message:

• Open the GnuPG clipboard
• Type your message
• Encrypt it and tick the box that says signed.
• Then copy that encrypted message into your email and send.

If you sign the message then your recipient will have your key if they want to reply.

To decrypt a message:

• Copy the message from your email into the GnuPG clipboard
• Click the decrypt button
• Read your message

It’s really quite simple to do. Here’s my public key so you can see what they look like.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (MingW32)

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJR8RrzAAoJEIInB8wv404/locH/3Dy5XO6QILd9Z17uFx/3syt
EEqgm/8taQSaQqeX71nSYWRPi2fmxZais99YfeCTkrd6bpUDode1L6g5U4PmJX/R
ARXzxMP1JjN5oP3fJXLlV5jw+IF99Ftx14M/kKrH/Xvf+cQ3hg6cqw2bpCNFMlF9
TvqO9GjfSGHrOQJ8Mo6YnvRIxYUyAdBq2TibbroDptdJoniziDAWrej0lMzibghN
F59G/kt7S89ulfs4XX7ya67IZNnXQekFiosS0CYyq9sEGqABBYuunXEv1x5raba9
x4DxyNvRnK/M6tJnYT5haZDs9EI/Y8loxhaORgNXLakgYSYZ2aEBT2hCdTB+RUE=
=BP9y
—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

If you want to see more options you have for protecting your privacy, have a look at PRISM ⚡ Break