How to Avoid Internet Surveillance and Protect Your Digital Privacy? Step by step guide

Currently, Internet is surrounded by a series of dangers that can affect user privacy , all this is due to internet surveillance that currently exists, where all online activity, online and offline data is being spied on and monitored by government agencies, ISPs and cybercriminals.

All of this has made the safety of web browsing more and more compromised as it seems like every time people have less trust and security mainly in terms of personal data and bank accounts. Although it has been found that in many countries the majority of Internet conversations are being spied on.

In this way, most of the users today search different methods and alternatives that allow them to slow down all this a bit, in order to avoid being permanently monitored and especially protect their digital integrity . This is how here we are going to teach you a little more about all of this and how you can avoid it, for this, follow in detail everything we are going to teach you below.

What is cybersurveillance and what risks does it pose to me on the Internet?

La cyber surveillance refers to the monitoring of activities carried out by users on the Internet, so when it is activity data in line in online and offline, and monitoring and recording of internet traffic , all by government agencies and institutions for the protection of national security, although many of these cases can be used in malicious purposes .

In this way, we can say that internet monitoring is caused by most governments and is currently applied in many countries. Recently, organizations such as the United States National Security Agency (NSA) have been involved in all of this, but even in other countries governments have also been involved in espionage activities on their citizens, all of this is justified by presumed reasons. national security.

Some of the justifications for this type of surveillance are that it is used to collect data on terrorists and criminals , in order to prevent these people from carrying out their malicious activities . But the truth of all this is that these types of activities are currently used for invade the privacy of online users, this is how all this can represent different risks for citizens .

Some of the risks are as follows:

• One of the most common in all of this is the hijacking of files on hard drives and mobile devices via the use of malware .
• The users can also be usurped .
• Le Phishing to usurp the Numeric identity individuals and the theft of personal data.
• Le lack of confidentiality for the user when surfing the Internet.
• Communications and personal data users can be seen at risk when spied on by companies or private institutions because all this information can be used for malicious purposes.

With all of this in mind, here we are going to leave you with some of the most famous internet monitoring agencies in the world:

• Communications Security Establishment of Canada (BBRI).
• Headquarters UK government communications (GCHQ).
• Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
• Australian Signals Branch (ASD).
• New Zealand Government Communications Security Office (GCSB).

In this way, the different governments use technology companies in order to facilitate their access to private information . In the event that these companies do not wish disclose the private information of their customers , in many cases, they have no other choice, as agencies such as the NSA can force them to comply with their demands.

In this way, large technology companies such as Google or Facebook could also be forced to share information with government and so reveal certain types of data in relation to national security work .

Should I inform businesses of my preferences online?

Power authorize or not the espionage of some companies on the various activities that are carried out on the web is somewhat complicated. It should be borne in mind that the Internet spying, identity theft, or the theft of private information are a recognized crime and prosecuted by law, but in these cases, these types of espionage are mainly led by of BUSINESSES governments to provide greater national security and thus be able to detect any type of danger that may affect the nation.

This way, even if users do not want to be monitored, it will be impossible to control it , the only thing to do in these cases is to take security measures that can reduce this type of risk. This is the number of people who try to escape this espionage by installing of barriers security or antivirus . However, it is quite possible that despite these measures, the government wants to access your information.

In the case of USA , Congress approved a Cyber ​​Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a law also known as Big Brother , where large American companies are required to share data with government , among other things data to be delivered are chat conversations, personal information, emails, among others.

All of this has been called abuse of government power to spy on citizens without their permission . Therefore, no one should allow companies to know their favorite information online , for that, they need to take some necessary steps which we will teach you later and which can help you protect your personal information a little.

What are the main methods used to do digital surveillance?

Currently, the PRISM program is one of the most discussed because it allows the NSA to collect data from the servers of service providers in the USA, where large companies such as Microsoft , Facebook , Google , Yahoo , Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), , among many others.

Therefore, any information stored on someone's servers risks being stored and analyzed by third parties. It exists also from other programs such as FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW , two are responsible for the collecting whole traffic is led by a gateway or a router specific .

In either case, you can find a wide variety of information that could be collected, such as data from navigation and HISTORY , even e - mails, videos, chats, photos and file transfers. In the case of XKEYSCORE is the one of the most recent programs that have been included and that is guaranteed to be on la lists NSA surveillance, which is related to linux distributions secure or virtual private networks such as VPN.

Keep in mind that this is not only applied by the United Kingdom and the United States, because many other countries collect data from citizens around the world. In this case, they may not read directly e-mails from citizens, but they can follow their activity and their habits navigation on social networks , the applications they use and possibly the associated information of their friends.

It should be borne in mind that all these data is collected by private companies as well as through social media, but that all of this data certainly ends up in the hands of the government, either through programs such as PRISM, either by court orders asking them to provide the data. collected. All this also happens for Internet service providers who, in many cases, must also provide the government with all data collected through their services.

Discover the most controversial cases of online surveillance that have been discovered

Currently, several online surveillance case were discovered who put more than one in constant alert , because all this exposed various types of spying on citizens around the world , which undoubtedly worries the most. of people.

That is why below we are going to show you some of the more controversial cases that have been found today:

Snowden and NSA

Edward Snowden went from spy agent for the United States to one of the most wanted men in this country. And it is that the matter concerning Snowden has become one of the most significant the history of massive espionage on the Internet. This is how this American citizen and former CIA agent has revealed methods of investigation and mass surveillance by the United States government.

According to the revelations of a former CIA agent, the government has even spied on heads of state and multinationals. More Who is Snowden really? He is a computer scientist from North Carolina who started working as a security guard and ended up working in the facilities secrets of the NSA, where he would later start working at the CIA as an expert in IT security .

In 2009 he left the CIA and started working in a private consulting firm within NSA facilities on a US military base in Japan. This is how this American citizen has revealed to The Washington Post violations de la security and privacy committed by its government, based on "I cannot in conscience allow the United States government to destroy the privacy and freedom of the Internet and the fundamental freedoms of people all over the world."

I don't want to live in a secret society where everything I do and say is recorded ”. Snowden went to Hong Kong is there that he first disclosed the documents where, according to the United States, it would have asked the verizon company to hand over all phone data to the FBI . Likewise, he granted an interview to The Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Where he said that Germany and Israel would also be involved in surveillance projects and even behind the creation of a cyber virus directed against suspicious computer systems to transmit information against these countries. After all these revelations and a few more, Snowden was considered by many to be a hero who is very likely to stand up for his convictions and protect physical and psychological damage that other people might experience.

While for other people, he is seen as a narcissist who tries to draw attention to himself. Since these revelations, he has become a target of United States, who sued him for treason. This is how he had to leave the États - United since then to avoid being arrested.

Massive extraction of intimate celebrity photos

Without a doubt, this was one of the most controversial cases in terms of online security and surveillance and is that a large number of celebrities have suffered a theft of photographs intimate which were then sold in an American forum known as 4Chan , where the person or people who posted all that content wanted to exchange it for Bitcoin payments.

In this case, the attacker has published several photographs with a list of celebrities where he had his intimate photographs , and where he points out that in the next few days he will be posting new images and even intimate videos of many of them. In this case, there were up to a thousand actresses, models and singers whose photos had been taken from their own online albums .

En 2012, the hacker who accessed to accounts in line de Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson a been sentenced to 10 years from prison , where he extracted intimate photographs of the two of them and they were then published on the Internet . These are some of the most relevant cases in terms of theft of intimate photographs of celebrities .

Adrian Lamo: the nomadic hacker

Adrian lamo has been known as the nomadic or vagrant hacker by many, because his main activity was to visit different cyber cafes and places with public internet access to carry out cyber attacks . This is how this young Adrian Lamo has carried out computer attacks through vulnerabilities that the computer security of large companies such as Bank of America, Yahoo! Or Microsoft .

Thus, in 2012, Adrian Lamo has was sentenced to six months of house arrest and two months probation for stealing the data of more than two thousand subscribers of the The New York Times newspaper . In addition, he became even more famous after reporting that the Private Bradley Manning , who allegedly leaked military information and from the United States Secretary of State at Wikileaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison .

Vladimir Levi known as "the pirate of St. Petersburg"

After the end of the cold war, the city of St. Petersburg has become one of the main points of piracy in the world , all of this has been used very well by Vladimir levi to perform a data and money mining from different bank accounts.

So in 1994 he managed to get more $ 10 million from customers of Citybank. However, after that he was arrested by Interpol and the following year he was sentenced to three years in prison and fined over 240 000 dollars . In addition, he was forced to return all the money he had taken from various clients of Citybank. So far, it has been estimated that Levin could be linked to Russian mafias .

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