Engaging in sound practices on communications security should not be limited to those who believe that they might at risk of government surveillance. Improving security is an reiterative process that is as much about education as technology.

There are ample tools and resources available for digital security education–for instance, Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders offer “Security in-a-box” which includes a How-to  Booklet, a collection of Hands-on Guides, as well as instructions on how you can use different security tools.Yet there are also basic practices you can use to secure your communications and that a majority of the public does not engage in.

These include using long passwords and different ones for each site that an individual has accounts with. KeePass and similar tools are useful for generating random, long passwords without having to memorize them. As mentioned before, two factor authentication reduces the chance that phishing can be used to access accounts.

Many major platforms, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox to name a few, support this feature. Many modern computer operating systems and phones offer full disk encryption, which decreases the chances that third parties can read devices that are stolen or confiscated. The cost of commercial antivirus is much smaller than the cost of criminals gaining access to ones files and accounts.