Amidst the havoc surrounding the earth-shattering revelations being made about the massive catch-all surveillance being conducted by the US government against virtually everybody with an Internet connection, a set of relatively unremarkable letters arrived in our GMail inboxes on Tuesday evening, containing a series of attachments. These attachments were scanned court orders, sealed and later unsealed, issued to Google by the United States District Court for the eastern district of Virginia.

A lot of people have been asking what can be done to counteract the NSA’s spying. There’s no simple answer to that, and frankly it’s a big mess. A number of cryptographic tools might improve privacy, including PGP and OTR for e-mail and IMs respectively, Cryptocat for multiplayer chat, TrueCrypt for encrypted hard drives, and so on. Some or all of these may be compromised, but given Glenn Greenwald’s descriptions of Edward Snowden’s behavior there is reason to believe that full disk encryption is at least practically safe for now (as far as he knows).

I like the idea of providing a list of tools for “breaking the Prism” – in fact, I started such a list with Daniel van der Velden from Metahaven yesterday, but the EFF beat us to it – they’re wonderful that way. Except I don’t agree on every point… See, while I agree that people should generally use free software, and should be using PGP (in the OpenPGP standard sense – not the PGP commercial software sense, an important distinction pointed out by @rikwes66) and OTR, and what not, I think their list of things is slightly lacking.

A few days ago, Arjen Nijeboer published on Democracy International’s website a short paper describing the ways in which he considered Direct Democracy with Initiative and Referendum to be superior to Liquid Democracy. I have written a response: It is worth asking here what Nijeboer means by “better”. Does it refer to a more democratic result, or a greater chance of participation? What does more democratic mean? What does simpler mean – as it appears that Nijeboer considers a simpler voting system to be “better,” as it is less exclusionary.