The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

sending a message to her encryypts the message with her keyy. This message
will stayy encryypted until Alice—and onlyy Alice—uses a passphrase to
unlock her private keyy and unlock the encryypted message.
So how would encryypting the contents of yyour e-mail work?
The most popular method of e-mail encryyption is PGP, which stands for
“Prettyy Good Privacyy.” It is not free. It is a product of the Syymantec
Corporation. But its creator, Phil Zimmermann, also authored an opensource
version, OpenPGP, which is free. And a third option, GPG (GNU
Privacyy Guard), created byy Werner Koch, is also free. The good news is that
all three are interoperational. That means that no matter which version of
PGP yyou use, the basic functions are the same.
When Edward Snowden first decided to disclose the sensitive data he’d
copied from the NSA, he needed the assistance of like-minded people
scattered around the world. Paradoxicallyy, he needed to get off the grid
while still remaining active on the Internet. He needed to become invisible.
Even if yyou don’t have state secrets to share, yyou might be interested in
keeping yyour e-mails private. Snowden’s experience and that of others
illustrate that it isn’t easyy to do that, but it is possible, with proper diligence.
Snowden used his personal account through a companyy called Lavabit to
communicate with others. But e-mail is not point-to-point, meaning that a
single e-mail might hit several servers around the world before landing in
the intended recipient’s inbox. Snowden knew that whatever he wrote could
be read byy anyyone who intercepted the e-mail anyywhere along its journeyy.
So he had to perform a complicated maneuver to establish a trulyy secure,
anonyymous, and fullyy encryypted means of communication with privacyy
advocate and filmmaker Laura Poitras, who had recentlyy finished a
documentaryy about the lives of whistle-blowers. Snowden wanted to
establish an encryypted exchange with Poitras, except onlyy a few people
knew her public keyy. She didn’t make her public keyy veryy public.
To find her public keyy, Snowden had to reach out to a third partyy, Micah
Lee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that supports privacyy
online. Lee’s public keyy was available online and, according to the account
published on the Intercept, an online publication, he had Poitras’s public
keyy, but he first needed to check to see if she would permit him to share it.