FBI Director James Comey told an audience he thinks the government should have a back door to gain access to secure devices. (Holly LaFon/MEDILL NSJI)

WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday criticized tech giants including Apple and Google for opposing so-called “back doors” in security software for government agencies to access encrypted phones, computers, and other devices.

The tech companies along with academic experts and advocacy groups wrote a letter to President Obama on Tuesday opposing statements by administration officials who have come out strongly against more robust encryption on consumer products. In fact, some officials have advocated that tech companies stop selling encrypted products altogether unless the government has a way to decrypt the data.

The letter makes the case that weakening products’ security would only make them more vulnerable to “innumerable criminal and national security threats.”

But Mr. Comey, addressing the Cybersecurity Law Institute at Georgetown University, said the FBI faces increasing difficulty in unlocking encrypted devices – and those who signed the letter were either not being fair-minded or were failing to see the societal costs to universal strong encryption.

“Either one of those things is depressing to me,” he said.

Citizens’ privacy interests and public safety are coming closer to “a full-on collision,” he said. Acknowledging “tremendous societal benefits” to encryption, Comey said the inability of law enforcement officials to gain access to encrypted devices when they have probable cause and strong oversight threatens public safety.

“As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption,” he said. “Therefore all of our lives … including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that to a democracy should be utterly concerning.”

However, tech companies and encryption advocates argue in the letter that creating back doors would also pose an economic threat to the companies, especially in light of the Edward Snowden leaks.

“US companies are already struggling to maintain international trust in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. Introducing mandatory vulnerabilities into American products would further push many customers – be they domestic or international, individual or institutional – to turn away from those compromised products and services,” the letter said.

What’s more, critics – including many lawmakers – who oppose efforts to weaken encryption say that creating a system in which government agencies have access to secure data would also create vulnerabilities exploitable by criminal hackers and other governments.

Comey acknowledged the business pressures and competitive issues involved, but urged tech companies to find a safe way to cooperate with government needs to access information.

“Smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily, technical people will say it’s too hard,” he said. “My reaction to that is, ‘Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people that we have in this country to figure something out?’ I’m not that pessimistic.”

Published in conjunction with

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

— Edward Snowden, answering questions live on the Guardian’s website

From surveillance to self-censorship, journalists are being subjected to increased threats from foreign governments, intelligence agencies, hacktivists and other actors who seek to limit or otherwise manipulate the information they possess. The notorious Edward Snowden stressed to the New York Times in an encrypted interview the importance of encryption for journalists: “It should be clear that [for an] unencrypted journalist to source communication is unforgivably reckless.” If journalists are communicating insecurely and without encryption, they put themselves, their sources and their reporting at unnecessary levels of risk. This sort of risky behavior may send the wrong message to potential key sources, like it almost did when Glenn Greenwald almost missed out on the landmark story of National Security Agency surveillance set out in the Snowden documents because he wasn’t communicating via encryption.

The aim of this how-to guide is to provide a clear path forward for journalists to protect the privacy of their reporting and the safety of their sources by employing secure communication methodologies that are proven to deliver.

How and When Should I Encrypt?

Understanding the basics of encryption and applying these tools and techniques to a journalist’s reporting is rapidly becoming the new normal when conducting investigative research and communicating with sources. It is, therefore, just as vital to know when and how to encrypt sensitive data as it is to understand the tools needed to do it.

In terms of when to encrypt, confidential information should be both encrypted “At-Rest” and “In-Transit” (or “In-Motion”). The term data-at-rest refers to data that is stored in a restful state on storage media. An example of this is when a file is located in a folder on a computer’s desktop or an email sitting in a user’s in-box. The term data-in-transit describes the change of data from being in a restful state to being in motion. An example of data-in-transit is when a file is being sent in an email or to a file server. With data-in-transit, the method of how the data is being transmitted from sender to receiver is the primary focus — not just the message. This is illustrated more effectively in the example of using a public wireless network in that if the network is not setup to use strong encryption to secure your connection, it may be possible for someone to intercept your communications. The use of encryption in this use case demonstrates how sensitive data, when not encrypted while in transit, can be compromised.

Methods for protecting Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Transit

Data-at-Rest can be protected through the following methods.

One suggested methodology is to encrypt the entire contents of the storage media, such as a hard drive on a computer or an external drive containing sensitive material. This method provides a higher level of security and can be advantageous in the event of a loss or theft of the storage media.

A second method – which should be ideally combined with the first method – is to encrypt the files, folders and email containing sensitive data using Pretty Good Privacy (or PGP) encryption. PGP encryption also has the added benefit of protecting data-in-transit, since the data stays encrypted while in motion

The name itself doesn’t inspire much confidence, but PGP or “Pretty Good Privacy” encryption has held strong as the preferred method by which individuals can communicate securely and encrypt files.

The concepts surrounding PGP and getting it operational can often seem complex, but this guide aims to make the process of getting started and using PGP clearer.

PGP Essentials: The Basics of Public and Private Keys

Before diving too deeply into the software setup needed to use PGP, it is important to understand a few key fundamentals of how PGP encryption works.

Within PGP and most public-key cryptography, each user has two keys that form something called a keypair. The reason the two keys are referred to as a keypair is that the two are mathematically linked.

The two keys used by PGP are referred to as a private key, which must always be kept secret, and a public key, which is available for distribution to people with whom the user chooses to communicate. Private keys are predominantly used in terms of email communications to decrypt emails from a sender. Public keys are designed for others to use to encrypt mail to the user.

In order to send someone an encrypted email, the sender must first have that recipient’s public key and have established a trusted relationship. Most encryption systems in terms of digital communications are based on establishing a system of trust between communicating parties. In terms of PGP, exchanging public keys is the first step in that process.

Key Management: Best Practices

Regardless of whether the user is using the OpenPGP standard with GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) or another derivative, there are a few useful points to consider in terms of encryption key management.

Private Keys are Private!

The most important concept to remember is that private Keys should be kept private. If someone compromises the user’s private key, all communications would be trivial to intercept.

Generating Strong Encryption Keys

When generating strong private/public keypairs there are some important things to remember:

• Utilize Large Key Sizes and Strong Hashing Algorithms

It is recommended that when generating a keypair to make the key size at least 4096bit RSA with the SHA512 hashing algorithm. The encryption key is one of the most important pieces in terms of how the encryption operations are executed. The key is provided to present a unique “secret” input that becomes the basis for the mathematical operations executed by the encryption algorithm. A larger key size increases the strength of the cryptographic operations as it complicates the math due to the larger input value. Thus, it makes the encryption more difficult to break.

• Set Encryption Key Expiration Dates

Choose an expiration date less than two years in the future.

• Strong Passphrase

From a security perspective, the passphrase is usually the most vulnerable part of the encryption procedure. It is highly recommended that the user choose a strong passphrase.

In general terms, the goal should be to create a passphrase that is easy to remember and to type when needed, but very hard for someone else to guess.

A well-known method for creating strong, but easy to remember, passwords is referred to as ‘diceware,’. Diceware is a method for creating passphrases, passwords and other cryptographic variables using an ordinary die from a pair of dice as a random number generator. The random numbers generated from rolling dice are used to select words at random from a special list called the Diceware Word List. The recommendation when using diceware to create a PGP passphrase is to use a minimum of six words in your passphrase. An alternative method for creating and storing strong passphrases is to use a secure password manager such as KeePass.

Backing Up Private Keys

Although a journalist may be practicing good security by encrypting sensitive information, it would be devastating if a disruptive event – such as a computer hardware failure – caused them to lose their private key, as it would be near-impossible to decrypt without it. When backing up a private key, it is important to remember that is should only be stored on a trusted media, database or storage drive that is preferably encrypted.

Public Key Servers

There are several PGP Public Key servers that are available on the web. It is recommended for journalists upload a copy of their public keys to public key servers like hkp://pgp.met.edu to open their reporting up to potential sources who wish to communicate securely. By uploading a copy of the public key to the key server, anyone who wants to communicate can search by name, alias or email address to find the public key of the person their looking for and import it.

Validating Public Keys: Fingerprints

When a public key is received over an untrusted channel like the Internet, it is important to authenticate the public key using the key’s fingerprint. The fingerprint of an encryption key is a unique sequence of letters and numbers used to identify the key. Just like the fingerprints of two different people, the fingerprints of two different keys can never be identical. The fingerprint is the preferred method to identify a public key. When validating a public key using its fingerprint, it is important to validate the fingerprint over an alternative trusted channel.

For example, if a journalist receives a public key for a source on a public key server, it is important for them to validate the key by either communicating in person, calling them over secure phone or via an alternate communication channel. The purpose of key validation is to guarantee that the person being communicated with is the key’s true owner.

Adding PGP Public Key Fingerprint to Twitter

For journalists, its important to ensure sources can quickly validate their public keys that they retrieve from Public Key servers. A common method to convey a PGP public key to the public is to tweet the public key fingerprint and link to that tweet in to the bio.

Another method is to link directly to the PGP key on a public keyserver (like MIT’s) and to provide a copy of the key fingerprint in the bio, like this example with Barton Gellman.

GNU Privacy Guard: Encrypting Email with GPG

Hold up, stop and wait a minute: I thought the topic of discussion was PGP.

Is GPG a typo?

No. In fact, GPG (or the GNU Privacy Guard) is the GPL-licensed alternative to the PGP suite of encryption software. Both GPG and PGP utilize the same OpenPGP standard and are fully compatible with one another.

Getting Started with GPG: From Setup to Secure

A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting up GPGTools on Apple OSX

Tutorial Objectives

• How to install and configure PGP on OS X
• How to use PGP operationally

Install the GPGTools GPG Suite for OS X

This step is simple. Visit the GPGTools website and download the GPG Suite for OS X. Once downloaded, mount the DMG and run the “Install.”

Select all modules and, then, press “Install.”

Generating a New PGP key

When the installer completes, a new app called “GPG Keychain Access” will launch. A small window will pop up immediately and say: “GPG Keychain Access would like to access your contacts.” Press “OK.”

After pressing “OK,” a second window will pop up that says “Generate a new keypair.” Type in your name and your email address. Also, check the box that says “Upload public key after generation.” The window should look like this:

Expand the “Advanced options” section. Increase the key length to 4096 for extra security. Reduce the “Expiration date” to 1 year from today. The window should look like this:

Press “Generate key.”

After pressing “Generate key,” the “Enter passphrase” window will pop up.

Okay, now this is important…

The Importance of Good Passphrases

The entire PGP encryption process will rest on the passphrase that is chosen.

First and foremost: Don’t use a passphrase that other people know! Pick something only you will know and others can’t guess. Once you have a passphrase selected, don’t give it to other people.

Second, do not use a password, but rather a passphrase — a sentence. For example, “ILoveNorthwesternU!” is less preferable than “I graduated from Northwestern U in 1997 and it’s the Greatest U on Earth?!” The longer your passphrase, the more secure your key.

Lastly, make sure your passphrase is something you can remember. Since it is long, there is a chance that you might forget it. Don’t. The consequences to that will be dire. Make sure you can remember your passphrase. In general there are several methodologies by which you can employ to store your passphrase to ensure its safekeeping. One such method would be to make use of a password manager like “KeePass”, an open source encrypted password database that securely stores your passwords.

Once you decide on your passphrase, type it in the “Enter passphrase” window. Turn on the “Show typing” option, so you can be 100% sure that you’ve typed in your passphrase without any spelling errors. When everything looks good, press “OK:”

You will be asked to reenter the passphrase. Do it and press “OK:”

You will then see a message saying, “We need to generate a lot of random bytes…” Wait for it to complete:

Your PGP key is ready to use:

Setup PGP Quick Access Shortcuts

Open System Preferences, select the “Keyboard” pane and go to the “Shortcuts” tab.

On the left hand side, select “Services.” Then, on the right, scroll down to the subsection “Text” and look for a bunch of entries that start with “OpenPGP:”

Go through each OpenPGP entry and check each one.

Bravo! You’re now done setting up PGP with OpenGPG on OS X!

Now, let’s discuss how to use it.

How to send a secure email

To secure an email in PGP, you will sign and encrypt the body of the message. You can just sign or just encrypt, but combining both operations will result in optimum security.

Conversely, when you receive a PGP-secured email, you will decrypt and verify it. This is the “opposite” of signing and encrypting.

Start off by writing an email:

1. Select the entire body of the email and “Right Click and Go to Services -> OpenPGP: Sign” to sign it.

2. Open the GPG Keychain Access app. Select “Lookup Key” and type in the email address of the person you are sending your message to. This will search the public keyserver for your source’s PGP key.

If your source has more than one key, select his most recent one.

You will receive a confirmation that your source’s key was successfully downloaded. You can press “Close.”

You will now see your source’s public key in your keychain.

3. You can now quit GPG Keychain Access and return to writing the email.

4. Select the entire body of the email (everything, not just the part you wrote) and “Right Click and Go to Services -> OpenPGP: Encrypt” to encrypt it. A window will pop up, asking you who the recipient is. Select the source’s public key you just downloaded and press “OK.”

5. Your entire message is now encrypted! You can press “Send” safely.

As a reminder, you will only need to download your source’s public key once. After that, it will always be available in your keychain until the key expires.

How to receive a secure email

With our secure message sent, the recipient will now want to decipher it. For the sake of this step, I will pretend that I am the recipient.

I have received the message:

1. Copy the entire body, from, and including, “—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—“, to, and including, “—–END PGP MESSAGE—“. Open a favorite text editor, and paste it:

2. Select the entire text, “Right click and select Services – OpenPGP – Decrypt” – to decrypt the message. You will immediately be prompted for your PGP passphrase. Type it in and press “OK:”

3. You will now see the decrypted message!

Next, you can verify the signature.

1. Highlight the entire text and “Right Click and Go to Services -> OpenPGP: Verify”. You will see a message confirming the verification.
2. Press “OK.”

Setting up GPG4Win on Windows

Tutorial Objectives

• How to install and configure PGP on a PC
• How to use PGP operationally

Installing the GPG4Win GPG Suite

This step is simple.

1. Visit the GPG4win website and download the GPG Suite for OS X.
2. Once downloaded, run the “Install”.

Download Install File

1. Double-Click on the downloaded file to begin the installation wizard.
2. Select the components to install, but keep it simple by installing all components except for Claws Mail.
3. Select “Next”

A brief description of each component:

• Kleopatra – a certificate manager
• GPA – another certificate manger
• GpgOL  – a plugin for Outlook
• GPGEX – an extension for Windows Explorer
• Claw-Mail – a lightweight email program with GnuPG support built-in
• Gpg4win Compendium  – a manual

4. Select desired preferences and click “Next”

5. Click “Finish” to exit the install wizard.

Setting up GPG4Win using Thunderbird and Enigmail

Enigmail, a play on words originating from the Enigma machine used to encrypt secret messages during World War I, is a security extension or add-on to the Mozilla Thunderbird Email software. It enables you to write and receive email messages signed and/or encrypted with the OpenPGP standard. Enigmail provides a more simplified method for sending and receiving encrypted email communications. This step-by-step guide will help you get started installing and configuring the extension.

1. Open Thunderbird and navigate to the Add-Ons Manager under the “Tools” menu.
2. In the search dialog box, type “Enigmail.”Now, a list of Add-Ons will be available.
3. Select the Enigmail add-on from the list.
4. Click the “Install” button.

5. There should now be a message indicating, “Enigmail will be installed after you restart Thunderbird.” Proceed with the installation by Clicking on the words “Restart Now”

6. After the Thunderbird application restarts, Enigmail should look like the image below. Proceed with configuring the add-on by Selecting Enigmail from the list.

7. Select “I prefer a standard configuration (recommended for beginners)” and click “Next”.

Generating a Public/Private Keypair.

1. Select the Account to generate the keys for.
2. Enter in a strong passphrase
   • If the passphrase isn’t strong enough, the Passphrase quality meter will indicate that with a red- or yellow-colored bar (vs. the green one shown in the image below).
3. Re-enter the strong passphrase to confirm.

The Key Generation Process will generate a series of data based on random activity and assign it to the randomness pool for which to generate the keypair.

4. Save the revocation key to a trusted and safe, separate device (storage media)!

The revocation certificate can be used to invalidate a public key in the event of a loss of a secret (private) key.

Key Management / View Key in Enigmail

1. Change the expiration date (suggested <2 years)

2. Upload Key To Public Keyserver (like hkp://pgp.mit.edu).

Public Keyserver Lookup

Look up the Public Keys of other people on public keyserver directly from within Enigmail.

1. Select “Search for Keys” from the “Keyserver” dropdown menu.
2. Enter in the Email Address or <FirstName><space><LastName> of the persons name that is being looked up.

A good test for this function is to try searching for Glenn Greenwald.

Notice how many active public keys Glenn Greenwald has. This could be intentional, but it can also happen when setting up keys on a new device or email client and 1. Forgot the private key passphrase 2. Lost the key revocation file or forgotten the passphrase to unlock it.

The problem is that anyone contacting the user for the first time will have to figure out which key is the correct one to use. It also becomes a security risk because any one of those unused, but active, keys could be compromised, and result in adversaries accessing communications.

MORAL Of THE STORY: Set an expiration date, manage the revocation key file and manage passphrases.

Revoking a Key

1. Right-click on the key and click on Key Properties.

2. At the bottom of the window Click on the ”Select Action” dropdown menu and Select “Revoke Key.”

3. A dialog box will pop up asking for the Private Key’s unique passphrase. Enter the passphrase for the key that is being revoked.

4. Once completed, the user will receive an ‘Enigmail Alert’ indicating that the key has been revoked. The alert warns the user that ‘if your key is available on a keyserver, it is recommended to re-upload it, so that others can see the revocation’. It is important to update the public keyservers to ensure that sources are aware of revoked keys and new keys on each account.

Operationalizing GPG: A Pragmatic Approach

What do encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify mean?

• Encrypt takes the user’s secret key and the recipient’s public key, and jumbles a message. The jumbled text is secure from prying eyes. The sender always encrypts.
• Decrypt takes an encrypted message, combined with the user’s secret key and the sender’s public key, and descrambles it. The recipient always decrypts. Encrypt and decrypt can be thought of as opposites.
• Signing a message lets the receiver know that the user (the person with the user’s email address and public key) actually authored the message. Signing also provides additional cryptographic integrity by ensuring that no one has interfered with the encryption. The sender always signs a message.
• Verifying a message is the process of analyzing a signed message to determine if the signature is true. Signing and verifying can be thought of as opposites.

When should someone sign a message? When should they encrypt?

If it is unnecessary to sign and encrypt every outgoing email, when should the user sign? And when should the user encrypt? And when should the user do nothing?

There are three sensible choices when sending a message:

• Do nothing. If the contents of the email are public (non-confidential), and the recipient does not care whether the user or an impostor sent the message, then do nothing. The user can send the message as they’ve sent messages their entire life: in plain text.
• Sign, but don’t encrypt. If the contents of the email are public (non-confidential), but the recipient wants assurance that the suspected sender (and not an impostor) actually sent the message, then the user should sign but not encrypt. Simply follow the tutorial above, skipping over the encryption and decryption steps.
• Sign and encrypt. If the contents of the email are confidential, sign and encrypt. It does not matter whether the recipient wants assurance that the user sent the message; always sign when encrypting.

For a majority of emails that the user may send, encryption is just not always necessary. The remainder of the time, the user should sign and encrypt.

Whenever there is confidential information — such as sensitive reporting information, source address and name information, credit card numbers, bank numbers, social security numbers, corporate strategies or intellectual property — users should sign and encrypt. In terms of confidential information, users should err on the side of caution and sign and encrypt gratuitously rather than doing nothing and leaking sensitive information. As for the third option, users can sign, but do not encrypt.

Best Practices in Information Security

Despite best practices regarding the operational usage of PGP encryption, a disregard for the fundamentals of information security can still put a journalist’s communications in peril. It doesn’t matter how strong the encryption is if the user’s laptop has already been compromised, and is only a matter of time before the journalists’ encrypted communication method is in jeopardy.

Below is a short list of some high-level information security best practices. For more information on this subject, see Medill’s National Security Zone Digital Security Basics for Journalists.

• Good password management

Journalists should not only create strong passwords, but also avoid using the same password for anything else. Consider using a password manager.

• Keep software up to date.

Update software frequently. This helps thwart a majority of attacks to your system.

• End-Point Security Software

Make use of antivirus and anti-malware software.

• Be wary of odd emails and accompanying attachments.

When in doubt, don’t click. The goal of most phishing attacks is to either get you to download a file or send you to a malicious website to steal your username and password. If it doesn’t seem right or doesn’t make sense, try reaching out to the person via an alternate communication method before clicking.

• Stay away from pirated software.

Nothing is truly free, as these software packages can often come with unintended consequences and malicious code packaged with them.

GPG Alternatives

• CounterMail: a secure online email service utilizing PGP without the complexity of complicated key management.
• DIME – Dark Internet Mail Environment: a new approach and potential game-changer to secure and private email communications.

Additional Resources

• Electronic Freedom Frontier – Lessons in security they might not teach at your j-school
• Medill National Security Zone – Digital Security Basics for Journalists
• RiseUp – https://help.riseup.net/en
• Security-in-a-Box – https://securityinabox.org/
• MIT PGP Keyserver – https://pgp.mit.edu

Glossary of Terms

Term Definitions provided by TechTarget.com, Webopedia.com, and Wikipedia.org

WASHINGTON — When whistleblower Edward Snowden used an email encryption program called PGP to contact documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, only a tiny fraction of journalists used it. The precaution, designed to scramble messages so only the sender and receiver can read them, was essential for Snowden to leak the information.

The series of stories that followed shocked the world and radically altered the way people think about government surveillance and the Internet. Now, encryption is becoming a standard item of the journalism toolkit, a must-have for anyone hoping to report on sensitive issues that might upset institutions of power. It was also the subject of a workshop recently held at Northwestern’s Medill newsroom in Washington, DC, which walked about 15 journalists through the basic software installations involved in setting up PGP, which is short for “Pretty Good Privacy” and ironically named after a grocery store in Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon.

Aaron Rinehart displays the GPG encryption download suite for those at the workshop to follow along. (J. Zach Hollo/THE GROUNDTRUTH PROJECT)

For Aaron Rinehart, one of the workshop’s leaders, the goal is to protect the relationship between journalists and their sources, “to get journalists confident using these tools so sources feel they can give them information safely,” said Rinehart. Without that possibility, he said, the Fourth Estate could be fundamentally crippled.

And it’s not just the NSA journalists and sources need to protect themselves from, warned Rinehart. He used an example of a story exposing pharmaceutical malpractice. “It’s not that sexy of an issue, right? But just think of the potential adversaries.” There’s the government whose regulators screwed up, the drug companies who are poisoning people, and their stakeholders who don’t want to lose profits. With any story, there are likely a host of people who want to hack the journalist and sources to prevent the information from being aired.

The workshop was taught by Rinehart and digital security advisers David Reese and Ferdous Al-Faruque. Rinehart and Reese recently founded TestBed Inc., a technology consulting company. And Al-Faruque is a master’s journalism student at the University of Missouri who said he wants to establish a class there on encryption and cyber security.

Rinehart, who spent time in Djibouti while serving in the Marine Corps, said his motivation for putting on the workshop came from a time when journalism salvaged his college career. “The media saved me,” he said. About a decade ago, Rinehart faced a bureaucratic nightmare at the University of Missouri, when he returned from serving abroad and was not permitted to complete his studies. A local paper led an investigation into the problems veterans were having there, and the university changed policies. Since then, Rinehart said he tries to do all he can to help journalists.

Of the reporters who attended, many are intent on investigative work like the kind that exposed the NSA’s mass, indiscriminate surveillance. “Since I cover national security and defense, I would definitely use this to coax sources to communicate with me or send me documents that they don’t want their government or our government to see or know about,” said Kristina Wong, a reporter for The Hill.

But others also attended, including a cryptologist who said he comes to events like this out of professional interest, and a human rights worker.

“In a lot of countries, activists and human rights defenders especially are really targeted,” said Sarah Kinosian, who monitors American security assistance in Latin America for the Center for International Policy. “So we want to make sure [victims] can pass documentation to us in a safe way.”

The workshop began with Rinehart and Reese playing a segment of Citizen Four, Poitras’s documentary on Snowden and government surveillance that recently won an academy award.

“I would like to confirm out of email that the keys we exchanged were not intercepted and replaced by your surveillance,” a narrator said, reading Snowden’s correspondence with Poitras as a line of ominous tunnel light split darkness on the screen. “Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase.” Rinehart interjected: “That is what we will be teaching you today.”

He then spoke for a while on the importance of responsible password management, recommending a program called KeePass, before moving on to downloading email client software and installing extensions designed to encrypt communications.

The way it works can seem daunting and complex, especially for anyone not tech-savvy. The email extension, called GPG or PGP, generates both a public and private key for each user. When PGP is used to send an email, the sender uses the receiver’s public key to encrypt the contents of the email so only the receiver’s private key can decrypt it.

Also on the other end, the receiver can see that the sender’s identity is confirmed. A public key is just what it sounds like: something meant to be made public along with an email address so the owner can be contacted by anyone. The private key must be kept secret by the owner, and is used to decrypt messages sent using his or her public key.

In essence, it’s is the same concept of an email. Anyone can send a message to someone but only that someone can read it. But encryption makes it nearly impossible for that message to be intercepted. And while subpoenas can force Google or Yahoo to turn over peoples’ emails, PGP makes it impossible for Google and Yahoo to read the messages, so they’d be turning over incoherent nonsense (although it is still possible to see who the sender and receiver are, and the subject line of the email is not encrypted. Ergo, aliases are commonly used once initial contact is made).

Click here to see my public key.

Encryption’s complexity has deterred it from becoming widespread, even in newsrooms. “At The Hill, not many people use it at all,” said Wong, something many would deem troublesome given the publication’s focus on politics and aim to bring transparency to Washington.

But most people agree the complexity is in the technical details behind the process, not in its application. “The world of cryptology and algorithms and coding that goes into encryption tools is difficult for just about anyone to comprehend,” Rinehart said. “But using the tools is quite simple for people who take the time to learn.”

While the majority journalists still do not use encryption, it is becoming common practice for many organizations who do investigative work. The New Yorker, The Intercept, Washington Post, and ProPublica are a few of the early sign-ons for Secure Drop, a new encryption system for journalists designed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and originally coded by Kevin Poulsen and the late Aaron Swartz. Gawker is another publication that uses it, showing encryption may become more widespread for groups focused on less hard-hitting subjects as well.

[Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post.]

WASHINGTON — The minds behind TestBed, Inc., a Virginia-based IT consulting firm specializing in IT planning, analytics, testing, prototyping and business advice for the public and private sectors, gave journalists a crash course in digital safety and encryption techniques at an April 3 seminar in Washington.

The daylong event, “Cyber Security Skill Workshop for Journalists: Sending Secure Email,” was co-sponsored by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and the Military Reporters & Editors Association, and held in the Medill Washington newsroom.

The seminar began with an introductory lecture on cybersecurity basics and common misconceptions about online privacy and security. Security-related superstitions, such as the idea that browsing in so-called “incognito” or “invisible” modes will keep your digital whereabouts truly hidden, were promptly dispelled.

TestBed’s Aaron Rinehart and David Reese then transformed the event into a hands-on lesson in PGP – an acronym for “Pretty Good Privacy” – as well as understanding other aspects of digital fingerprints (including how to create a public key, how to register it in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s PGP directory so that you are more widely contactable by those in the encryption know and how to revoke (or deactivate) a key for security reasons.

The program also included a brief introduction to the Tor network, a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor, originally developed by the U.S. Navy, hides the route taken from a computer’s IP address to its eventual browsing destination.

Learn how Tor works via Medill reporter William Hicks’ helpful primer and infographic here.

When asked for the top three lessons he hoped attendees would take away from the event, Rinehart emphasized the importance of “good key management,” or not sharing your private PGP key with anyone, operating “under good security practices”(such as updating software and antivirus programs) and making email encryption a regular habit.

“Don’t compromise convenience for security,” Rinehart said in a post-workshop interview. “Try to make this something you can use everyday.”

The event drew a mix of reporters, security experts and students, which included military veterans and defense journalists.

Northwestern University in Qatar journalism student James Zachary Hollo attended the event to research encryption resources available for foreign correspondents and to report on the workshop for the Ground Truth Project in Boston, where he is currently completing his Junior Residency.

Hollo said the seminar gave him a better understanding of how to use PGP.

“I had sort of experimented with it before I came here, but this gave me a much better and deeper understanding of it, and I got to sort of refine my ability to use it more,” he said.

Hollo said he was surprised that many attendees came from military service or military reporting backgrounds, since, in his view, “one of the blowbacks against the NSA story [involving whistleblower Edward Snowden] was that it’s like reporting is like betraying your country.”

But is there a way to live normally while also living less visibly on the grid? What steps can you take to reduce your digital footprint that don’t overly restrict your movements?

What is a digital footprint?

Your digital footprint is the data you leave behind when you use a digital service—browse the web, swipe a rewards card, post on social media. Your digital footprint is usually one of two classifications: active or passive.

Your active digital footprint is any information you willingly give out about yourself, from the posts you put up on Facebook to the location information you give to your local mass transit system when you swipe your transit pass.

By contrast, your passive digital footprint is information that’s being collected about you without your express knowledge or authorization, for example, the “cookies” and “hits” saved when you visit a website. When you see personalized ads on Google, for example, those are tailored to you through collection of your personal preferences as inferred through collection of your passive digital footprint.

To assess my digital footprint, I looked through my wallet, my computer and my phone.

The footprint in your wallet

First, the wallet: I have several rewards cards, each representing a company that has a record of me in its database that shows how often I shop and what I buy, which is linked to my name, address, email and birthday—plus a security question in case I forget my password, usually my mother’s middle name.

While I would consider this information fairly benign—they don’t have my credit card information or my Social Security number—these companies can still make many inferences about me from my purchases. CVS, for example, could probably say fairly accurately if I’m sick based on my purchase of medications, whether I’m sexually active based on birth control purchases and any medical conditions I may have based on my prescription purchases.

If I wanted to minimize my digital footprint, I could terminate all my rewards accounts and refrain from opening any more. For me, though, it’s worth allowing these companies to collect my information in order to receive the deals, coupons and specials afforded me as a rewards member.

Next up is my transit pass, which is linked to my name, local address and debit card. The transit authority has a record of every time I swipe my way onto a city bus or train, a record of my movements linked to my name.

A minimal-footprint alternative to a transit pass is single-use fare cards. If purchased with cash, they would leave no record of my travels linked to my name. While this, like the rewards cards, is feasible, it’s far less convenient than the pass —so much less so that again I’m willing to compromise my privacy.

My debit card and insurance card are the two highest-value sources of personal information, but both are utterly necessary—living half a country away from my local credit union, I need my debit card to complete necessary transactions. My medical insurance card, relatively useless to identity thieves unless they have an ID with my name on it, does represent another large file in a database with my personal information—doctors’ visits, prescriptions and hospital stays for the past several years. People with just the physical card, not my license or information, can’t do much with that, but if a hacker gets to that information it could be very damaging.

No driver’s license? No credit card?

To minimize my digital footprint, then, I could pare down my wallet to just the absolute necessities—my insurance card, debit card and my license. You didn’t talk about your license

Computer footprint

If I’m guilty of leaving a large digital footprint, all my worst infractions probably happen across the Web.

Between Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, I’ve broadcast my name, picture, email, hometown and general movements, if not my specific location, on each of those sites. Of the three, Facebook certainly has the most comprehensive picture of my life for the past seven years—where I’ve been, with whom, what I like and what I’m thinking.

If I wanted to take myself as far off the grid as feasible, simply deactivating the accounts wouldn’t work—Facebook keeps all your information there for you to pick up where you left off. You can permanently delete it with no option for recovery, but some information isn’t stored just on your account—messages exchanged with friends, for example, or any information shared with third-party apps.

If you keep using social networking sites, privacy policies change frequently, meaning that even if you choose the most restrictive privacy settings, you often have to go back and re-set them whenever the company changes its policy. Apps complicate things even further, farming out much of your information to third-party companies with different privacy policies.

Even if you’re vigilant about your privacy settings and eschew apps, your profile is only as private as your most public Facebook friend, said Paul Rosenzweig, a privacy and homeland security expert.

When shopping online, it’s important to check the privacy statements and security policies of the companies you’re using. If possible, purchase gift cards to the specific retailer or from credit card companies and use those to shop, so you don’t leave your credit card information vulnerable to breaches like that of Target.

I know that email is not my friend when it comes to online privacy, but I can’t operate without it.  I use Gmail on Google Chrome for my email, so I installed Mymail-Crypt. It’s one of several “pretty good protection,” or PGP, encryption programs. Using it, my messages appear to be a jumbled bunch of letters until the recipient decrypts it using their private key, which I can save to a key server, like the aptly named Keyserver, where it’s searchable by my email or key ID. I can then link to it on my personal profiles such as Facebook or LinkedIn. People can then send an encrypted email to me using my public key that cannot be read without my private key to unlock it. I’ve also started encrypting my G-Chats using Off the Record chat.

Email can be used against you. Phishers have started to send more sophisticated emails imitating individuals or companies you trust in order to convince you to give up information like your social security number or credit card data. Drew Mitnick a junior policy counselor at digital rights advocacy group Access Now, said you need to be vigilant no matter what you’re doing on the internet.

“Ensure that whoever you’re dealing with is asking for appropriate information within the scope of the service,” he said. In other words, Gap shouldn’t be asking for your Social Security number.

To limit cookies and other data collection during your Internet use, you can open incognito windows in Google Chrome. In incognito mode, the pages you view don’t stay in your browser or search histories or your cookie store—though your Internet service provider and the sites you visit still have a record of your browsing.

Finally, encrypt your hard drive. Privacy laws vary from state to state and country to country so the best way to ensure that you’re protected no matter where you are is to encrypt your computer and be careful not leave it where someone can mess with it, said Mitnick.

Phone footprint

Another source of vulnerability for many people is a smartphone. As long as you have a phone, you’re on the grid—phone companies can triangulate your position using cell phone towers and location services, and they log your calls. Beyond that, though, there are steps you can take to limit information people can access about you using your phone.

First, be judicious when installing apps. Carefully read the permissions an app requires for installation, and if you’re uncomfortable with them, don’t install it! Read privacy policies and terms of use so you know what data the app keeps on you.

Because I have a Windows phone, many of the basic apps (alarms, maps, Internet Explorer, music, and Microsoft Office) are Microsoft apps and use their terms of use and privacy policy, which is pretty good about not sharing my information with third parties. They also delete your account data after you delete their app, though it may take a few weeks.

I have several social apps, such as the aforementioned Facebook and Pinterest, for which the privacy settings are fairly similar to their desktop counterparts—not very private—with the added bonus of them now having access to my location and phone number. It’s entirely possible—and advisable, if you’re trying to leave a minimal footprint—to live without these apps, but I choose not to.

I’m selective about the apps I install on my phone. Aside from the apps that come with the phone and my social media apps, I only have Uber—and that has a lot of access to my phone. According to the app information, Uber can access my contacts, phone identity, location, maps, microphone, data services, phone dialer, speech and web browser. That’s a lot, and not all of it seems necessary—why does Uber need my contacts? Again, though, I chose to compromise my privacy on this one because the convenience, for me, outweighed the risk.

A precaution I’ve always taken is turning off my location service unless I need it. While my cell phone company can still track me, this prevents my apps from accessing my location. I don’t need Pinterest or Facebook to know where I am to get what I want out of the app, so I don’t provide that information to them.

One of the projects Access Now has been working on is “super cookies”—when you use your cell phone, the cell companies can attach unique identifiers to your browsing as you go across multiple sites. Many companies don’t even offer opt-outs. AT&T has now stopped using super cookies, but other companies still do so.

If you don’t already, use two-step verification whenever possible to ensure that no one but you is logging onto your accounts. This process, used by Gmail, has you enter your password and a one-time numerical code texted to a phone number you provide.

Set a passcode to your phone if you haven’t already, and make it something people couldn’t easily guess—don’t use your birthday, for example. I’ve started using random numbers and passwords generated for long-defunct accounts like my middle school computer login that I memorized years ago but that can’t be linked back to me.

Amie Stepanovich of Access Now suggested using four unrelated words strung together for online account passwords—they’re even harder to hack than the usual suggestions of capital and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers.

One final precaution you can take is to encrypt your device. Apple has already started encrypting its phones by default, and Google has promised to do so. Regardless, you can turn on encryption yourself. I have a Windows phone, which does not allow for easy encryption—in fact, I can’t encrypt my SD card at all. To encrypt my phone, I need to log in to Office 365 on my laptop and change my mobile device mailbox policies to require a password, encryption, and an automatic wipe after a number of passcode fails I choose. I then log into Office 365 on my phone to sync the new settings. It’s much more straightforward for an Android—just go to settings, security, and choose “Encrypt phone.”

Off the grid? Not even close

For me – and most people, it’s not feasible to live entirely off the grid. Between my debit card, various online accounts and smartphone, I pour my personal data into company and government databases every day. The trick is to live on the grid intelligently, only providing the information that is necessary and taking steps to protect your devices from unauthorized access.