Security

Jitsi is a communications program that allows you to chat securely using well-supported protocols like SIP, XMPP / Jabber, AIM / ICQ, Windows Live, Facebook and Yahoo. You can also make audio and video calls and share or stream your desktop to someone else. Conference calls and call recording are also possible. Most importantly, all of these features can be used together with a strong encryption.

ObscuraCam is an Android application that allows you to obscure faces or objects in photos or videos to keep certain information private. It allows you to black out or pixelate certain areas of an image. You can also reverse pixelate, so that only the person is visible and the background becomes blurred. The application also allows you to remove telltale metadata such as GPS location, phone make and model, and author information.

The details of users using live chat provided by Yahoo, Windows, Skype and Gmail are readily made available to law enforcement agencies by the companies involved.

HTTPS Everywhere is an add-on for Chrome or Firefox. HTTPS is a secure communications protocol that stops other people from being able to see the conversation between your computer and the website you are visiting. It can hide web content and details like passwords and data you input into forms. Many sites have HTTPS turned off by default. HTTPS Everywhere forces your browser to use HTTPS everywhere that it possibly can. You can tell if HTTPS is being used as you will see https:// instead of http:// in your browser's address bar.

Tor is a network tool that allows you to improve your privacy and security on the internet. Using Tor helps stop a kind of surveillance called traffic analysis, which is used to detect who is communicating with each other over the internet. There is even a stand-alone browser available for download. Tor can be used to keep websites from tracking you or to connect to news sites or instant messaging services that are blocked by local Internet providers.

K9 is a stable and popular email client for Android mobile devices.

A free software project created by a strong community of volunteers, K9 makes it easy to add multiple accounts and to deal with large amounts of incoming emails. It has recently added support for GPG encryption, which is a common way of sending encrypted messages.

For more information about encryption, consult Tactical Tech's Security-in-a-box guide.

Thunderbird is a popular free software email client from the Mozilla foundation. Many people with a stable internet connection now check their emails in an internet browser with a service like gmail or yahoo. However, there are several advantages to using an email client rather than webmail. These include the ability to easily check mail from multiple accounts, to read and write email when you are not connected to the internet, and to access email on older computers more efficiently.