The Guardian interviewed Edward, and it’s a fascinating read/watch at any rate, but relevant to our 10th tip is this quote: “He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.”
This little fact occurred to me one day while logging into my computer in an airport. If I’m typing in my passwords while sitting in front of a surveillance camera, I’ve essentially given away my passwords to anyone with access to the camera. A quick way to mitigate this vulnerability to all but the most well-placed cameras is to simply tilt down the screen of your laptop such that it covers your fingers on the keyboard while typing your password.
Here’s another one for the less paranoid: key loggers. Any time you’re using a computer other than your own (and sometimes, even your own) there’s a risk that software is installed to record all keystrokes. Computers at Internet cafes are especially vulnerable to this. Try not to use public computers for entering passwords that can access financial accounts, which is what most hackers will target.
Stay tuned for the big announcement in half an hour… 🙂
This is one of a 30-part series, “No Surveillance State Month,” where daily for the month of June I’ll be posting ways to avoid invasion of your privacy in the digital age. The intent of these posts is not to enable one to escape detection while engaging in criminal activity — there’s still the old-fashioned “send a detective to watch you” for which these posts will not help. Rather, this series will help you to opt-out of the en masse collection of data by the government and large corporations that places Americans in databases without their knowing and freely-given consent for indefinite time periods. We all have the right to privacy, and I hope you demand it.
Professional Troublemaker ® 
“It has turned out to be quite incredible that my ‘No Surveillance State Month’ theme coincided with the month where a former NSA employee leaked”
I’m not entirely convinced this is just a coincidence. I believe in God and spiritual warfare because many of these things make the most sense in such a context. Many of the decisions made by leaders make little to no sense, or seem to have highly self-destructive motivations that can’t be accounted for by despair, addictions, or other things generally associated with suicidal tendencies. Last month, I found a small business inexplicably destroying itself, making bad decision after bad decision as though the decision makers actually wanted to lose all their money, bankrupt the business, and destroy their professional reputations. How can that be?
While “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but … against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) and “Beloved, believe not every spirit …: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1) can explain precious little about what is truly going on, it is better sense than none at all.
God has shown Himself to me through some rather interesting coincidences. I write quite a lot, and often when I do, I encounter music or other fiction that tells the same story, but there can’t possibly any inspirational connection. This has happened to me dozens of times, and it’s jarring each time, especially when the story I’ve written feels like I’m receiving it from a mind outside my own. A small example is just now, when I had “Stand My Ground” by Within Temptation playing when I got this blog post. A bigger one is when I wrote a story about a girl experiencing a nuclear explosion while at a fenced swimming pool the day before I heard then unreleased open-air performance of Lights’ “Where The Fence Is Low” which described this story.
But hey, maybe it is just a coincidence.