The Guardian is reporting NSA and the FBI have been tapping directly into the servers of nine US service providers, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL and Skype, and began this surveillance program at least seven years ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

This revelation should be a wake up call to anyone concerned about protecting their emails from surveillance. Were you also aware the US goverment can already read any mail you have left on a server for over 6 months: http://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government-read-your-email-2013-6

Lessons everyone should learn: don’t leave your email on public servers and take steps now to protect your anonymity. Remember that in order to send and receive email with a reasonable expectation of privacy and security you need to address two areas of concern:

First, can your emails be traced to your location? Don’t use free public email accounts like Gmail, use an anonymous email service. Visit Alternatives to Tormail for an up to date list of mail services that do not log your IP or include in the headers of your sent mail.

Second, is your data strongly encrypted? Use PGP encryption for email you wish to remain private. The easiest way to PGP encrypt your email is to use the portable encryption program gpg4usb.

gpg4usb is a lightweight and completely portable encryption assistant that can be used from your desktop, a USB drive or Truecrypt container. Once the program is started it can be used to generate your PGP keypair, import and export keys and encrypt/decrypt files or text messages.

Just paste the message you want to encrypt or decrypt in the editor’s text window and select who you want to encrypt or decrypt for, click the encrypt or decrypt button and you are done. You can copy an encrypted message using clipboard and then paste into an email.

While gpg4usb can be run from a folder on your desktop, remember that your private key has to be stored in an encrypted volume for security. If your laptop is not encrypted you can find a tutorial at the guide on how to encrypt your laptop.

If you do not have an encrypted computer you can make a small Truecrypt container and store gpg4usb in the encrypted container, which you can leave on your desktop or move to a USB drive.

If you would like to use your PGP keys with the Thunderbird email program from a USB drive visit the guide by Security In a Box on Portable Thunderbird with GPG and Enigmail.