InfoWorld: Maximum security: Essential tools for everyday encryption

Thanks to technical advances and increased adoption, securing your data and communications is a lot easier than you might think

By Fahmida Y. Rashid
Dec 14, 2015

Encryption is under attack. Regardless of whether you think you have anything to hide, you should be concerned.

Encryption is the chief means by which we can secure our sensitive private information and communications from prying eyes, and governments around the world are challenging our ability to use encryption technologies by arguing that encryption makes it difficult for law enforcement officials to conduct investigations or monitor suspicious online activity. Their solution? Establishing "backdoors" through which government entities would be able to unlock protected data.

The best way to stop government from pressing forward with its demands for weakening encryption -- and that's exactly what backdoors would accomplish -- is to make encryption ubiquitous and mainstream. If everyone is using encryption, from encrypted chat to encrypted email to encrypted Web surfing and everything in between, then it becomes much harder to argue that encryption protects only the select few who have something to hide.

Where to get started? To date, the primary challenge preventing encryption from being a routine factor in most people's computing lives is the fact that it is still relatively difficult to employ. Encryption has traditionally required users to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work, but that is slowly changing. Here we list various encryption technologies you can easily use to protect your data from prying eyes and to communicate online securely and privately. The more people use them, the harder it gets to take away our right to privacy and security.

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