Protecting your online privacy — a series by Bill Day

Starting this week, Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition is pleased to host a series of posts on protecting your online privacy, written by Bill Day.  The posts now include…

• Protect Your Digital Privacy: Introduction
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: Browser Security
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: Passwords
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: WiFi
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: Email Pt. 1 (S/MIME)
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: People Power with PGP
• Protect Your Digital Privacy: On the Phone

Bill is an employment lawyer by day and a digital privacy and Internet use activist by night.  He’ll be suggesting ways you can enhance your online privacy with email encryption, anonymizing your Internet surfing, best practices, and more.  Perhaps even more importantly, he’ll be suggesting *why* you should care about and protect your digital privacy.

See also the “Not Without A Warrant” campaign by BORDC, ACLU and other civil liberties organizations to upgrade our online privacy by revisiting and reforming the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act… of 1986, when people were still just about using carrier pigeons or two cans and a string.  A BORDC press release notes that “Under ECPA, the government argues it does not need a warrant to read private email or documents stored in the Internet “cloud” or to track people using their mobile phones.”  Click on the image to send a petition to Congress stating:

The government should be required to go to a judge and get a warrant before it can read our email, access private photographs and documents we store online, or track our location using our mobile phones. Please support legislation that would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) to require warrants for this sensitive information and to require the government to report publicly on the use of its surveillance powers.

For more about ECPA and why a privacy upgrade is needed, you can visit the ACLU’s blog series “ECPA at 25” about it (hashtag #UpdateECPA)  … and you can also come back to this blog and learn from Bill Day how and why to take your electronic privacy into your own hands.