I urge everyone to protect the security of the sensitive information that you possess or wish to exchange. History indicates that any loosening of privacy rights and an increased ability of the authorities to wiretap leads to abuse. Only a month ago, the Ottawa Citizen ran a series on the new "Public Order Program," CSIS and RCMP surveillance of activists, and the criminalization of dissent.

With last Tuesday's terrible attacks on Washington and New York, US lawmakers are calling for even more overt surveillance of electronic communications.

Wired News has learned that the FBI reportedly began installing its controversial Carnivore system at some Internet providers, including Hotmail, in order to monitor and record electronic communications, particularly the accounts of indiciduals with "Arab" names.

The U.S. Senate approved legislation this week that would make it easier for the FBI to obtain warrants for electronic eavesdropping. And Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., saying that civil libertarians in the past had blocked legislation essential in a terrorism fight, vowed to push for laws to make search and surveillance easier in domestic intelligence-gathering efforts.

We still have access to strong encryption, and I recommend some of these free and powerful tools to protect your privacy.

:: Hushmail provides free, end-to-end, 2,048 bit, OpenPGP-based encryption of email to other Hushmail users. It is Web-based, so you don't need to change any setting in your email client, and is quite easy to use.

:: Scramdisk is a program that creates virtual, encrypted drives. It makes a container file on an existing hard drive that is protected by a password you set. The container, which can be as small as 250 K or as large as 4 gigs, can be mounted by Scramdisk software as if it were a real floppy or hard drive. The user has a choice of a number of industry standard encryption algorithms: Triple-DES, IDEA, MISTY1, Blowfish, TEA, and Square.

:: Anonyizer provides a free, completely private and secure way to surf the Web anywhere, anytime.

:: Window Washer is a powerful and flexible data cleaning system for a single-user Windows PC. Regular use protects you from unwanted data remaining on you your PC.