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Book Review: Social Nation

Business, Reviews

I recently had an opportunity to read Social Nation: How to harness the power of Social Media to attract customers, motivate employees & grow your business by Barry Libert.  Heckuva title.

Libert is the the CEO at Mzinga, which is a company that connects other companies–and their customers–using social media to collaborate and communicate.  Social media is, quite simply, using the internet to drive interactive communication.  This includes Twitter, Facebook, and forums.  Sometimes, it’s just discussion, sometimes, it’s sharing user-generated content.

Social Nation “will show you, as an employee, customer or partner, how to use new social technologies, make yourself heard, and produce better products and services.”   It bills itself as a “complete toolbox” for social media.   Does it match the hype? Let’s see.

The book is broken into three sections.

Part 1: The Future of Business is Social

Libert asserts that the future of business is social.   That is obviously true, to a degree. A solid viral marketing campaign can drive more eyeball to a product than a full-page spread in the New York Time or a 30-second spot during Super Bowl halftime.  However, there are a lot–possibly a majority–of business-to-business companies that will gain no value from a social media campaign.   Would a regional supplier with an exclusive distributorship for a top-name line of faucets benefit from being on Twitter?  No.  On the other hand, 17% of our time online is spent on social applications and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is 35 years old or older.  There is certainly some value to be gained by have a social media presence in some markets.

This section(all of chapter 3!) also contains a link to a test to determine your social media skills.   I haven’t taken the test, mainly because I don’t feel like registering for another site.  This struck me as nothing more than lead generation, which is a shame.  It could be a useful tool.

Part 2: Seven Principles for Building Your Social Nation

This section has seven chapters, containing 7 case studies that detail the 7 principle of social media, as defined by Libert and Mzinga.

The principles include:

  • Let the culture lead the way, as demonstrated by Zappos.com.
  • Involve your fans.  The big takeaway from chapter 8 is that, when you create a community, your job is to facilitate involvement, not to control it.  If you try to run it with an iron fist, it will choke and die.
  • Reward others and you will be rewarded. Apple lets developers keep 70% of the money they make in the app store.  That encourages developers to develop, making everyone more money.   Give.  Karma will take care of the rest.
  • There are 4 other principles, but some are just common sense, and I don’t want to give away the contents of the book.

Part 3: Start Today and Create Your Own Social Nation

aka

Chapter 11: How to Get Started and 10 Pitfalls to Avoid

Section 3 has just one chapter, but it’s a good one.    It explains the difference between followers and fans, the value of each and how to bond with each.   The difference?  Fans are actively involved.   Followers are far more passive.

This section/chapter also goes into some things to avoid, like abandoning a social media strategy too early, failing to market your business, underestimating the power(positive and negative) of a social network.

Is it worth getting the book?

Social Nation bills itself as a complete social media toolbox, but it falls a bit short.   The book tackles social media from a purely strategic point of view, ignoring the tactical concerns.   It’s clearly geared toward helping a company plan its social media strategy from a 10,000 foot perch.   For the people in the trenches, or anyone with a grasp of strategy that’s looking for the details on running a social media campaign, it’s not enough.  That said, if you are trying to plan a social media strategy, or you have no idea where to start, this is a great book for you.   It holds a lot of value, but stops some distance before “complete”.  Definitely worth a read if you are involved is social media planning.

Giveaway

I’m giving away Social Nation.   If you’d like to have a chance to get it, just leave a comment, telling me how you like to see companies use social media.  Fair warning, this is the book I read, so it’s “used”.   I take care of books, so you can’t tell that it’s used.

Publishers, Publicists, and Authors

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please contact me.

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Clearing Up Social Debt in 3 Steps

Finance

Debt can be thought of as a disease–probably social.  Most of the time, it was acquired through poor decision making, possibly while competing with your friends, occasionally after having a few too many, often as an ego boost.  Unfortunately, you can’t make it go away with a simple shot of penicillin.   It takes work, commitment and dedication.  Here are three steps to treating this particular affliction.

1.  Burn it, bash it, torch it, toss it, disinfect. Get rid of the things that enable you to accumulate debt.   If you keep using debt as debt, you will never have it all paid off.   That’s like only taking 3 days of a 10 day antibiotic.   Do you really want that itchy rash bloodsucking debt rearing its ugly head when you’ve got an important destination for your money?   Take steps to protect yourself. Wrap that debt up and keep it away.

2.  Quit buying stuff. Chances are, you have enough stuff.  Do you really need that Tusken Raider bobble-head or the brushed titanium spork?  They may make you feel better in the short term, but after breakfast, what have you gained?  A fleeting memory, a bit of cleanup, and an odd ache that you can’t quite explain to your friends.   Only buy the stuff you need, and make it things you will keep forever.  If you do need to indulge, hold off for 30 days to see if it’s really worthwhile.   If it’s really worth having, you can scratch that itch in a month with far fewer regrets.

3.  Spend less. This is the obvious one.  The simple one.  The one that makes breaking a heroin addiction look like a cake-walk(My apologies to recovering heroin addicts.  If you’re to the point that personal finance is important to you, you’ve come a long way.  Congratulations!).  Cut your bills, increase your income.  Do whatever it takes to lower your bottom line and raise your top line. Call your utilities.  If they are going to take your money, make them work for it.   If they can’t buy you drinks or lower your payments, get them out of your life.   There’s almost always an alternative.   Don’t be afraid to banish your toxic payments. Eliminate your debt payments.  This page has a useful guide to debt and how to clear it off.

Update:  This post has been included in the Festival of Frugality.

Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection

Finance

When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it.  You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.

There are two main ways to do that:  AdSense or product promotion.   To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.

I don’t do that.

I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up.  This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.

My niches site are all product-promotion sites.  I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it.

Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.

The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made.     There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs.     Here are a few:

  • Amazon.   If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase.   That means you have a lot of product to choose from.   Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return.   On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
  • Commission Junction.   These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks.  If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!)   They have a lot of other products, too.
  • e-Junkie.  This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers.   It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process.   A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
  • ClickBank.  My favorite.   This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses.   Commissions are good, often 50-75%.   They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer.  This is the site I’ll be using for this series.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.

If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.

Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.

Clickbank

From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell.   Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:

  • Back pain
  • Bankruptcy
  • Conflict resolution at work
  • Detox diets
  • Fat kids
  • Foreclosure avoidance
  • Job hunting
  • Weddings
  • Writing sales copy

I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche.  When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.

For now, go to advanced search.

CBSearch

Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats.     Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month.  I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable.  Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.

The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product.   I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale.  Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box.    That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.

This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products.    After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1,  I’ve got 211 results.    Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting.   One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%.  The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate.   Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale.  I’ll add both to the list for further research.

I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches.  That would be repetitive.  You can see my selections here:

Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.

The Sales Page

We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck.    If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.

  • Raw Foods is eliminated.  The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing.  It’s a crap site.
  • The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out.  Site’s down today.  I want reliability.
  • Management Training By The Book is out.  I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.

The Email List

If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails.   If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions.  In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription.  It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that.  On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product.  Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate.  Absolutely unethical.

  • Wedding speeches is eliminated for  throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process.  There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.

Checkout and Credit

Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page.  You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.

The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information.   It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID.   Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.

When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once.  That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time.  I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies.  If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.

Other Factors

Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right.  When that happens, drop it.  There are millions of other products you can promote.   In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem.  Here’s a life tip:  If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.

  • Another important factor is the sales page itself.  If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
  • Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link.  If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
  • Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page.  The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.

Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches.    At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions.   As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.

We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment.   That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.

Any questions?

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Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

Business, Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how to set up a WordPress site.   I’m going to show you exactly what settings, plugins, and themes I use.   I’m not going to get into writing posts today.  That will be next time.

I use WordPress because it makes it easy to develop good-looking sites quickly.   You don’t have to know html or any programming.   I will be walking through the exact process using Hostgator, but most hosting plans use CPanel, so the instructions will be close.  If not, just follow WordPress’s 5 minute installation guide.

Installing WordPress

Assuming you can follow along with me, log in to your hosting account and find the section of your control panel labeled “Software/Service”.  Click “Fantastico De Luxe”.

Fantastico

On the Fantastico screen, click WordPress, then “New Installation”.

Install WordPress

On the next screen, select your domain name, then enter all of the details: admin username, password, site name, and site description.  If you’ll remember, I bought the domain  http://www.masterweddingplanning.net.   I chose the site name of “Master Wedding Planning” and a description of “Everything You Need to Know to Plan Your Wedding”.

Click “install”, then “finish installation”.   The final screen will contain a link to the admin page, in this case, masterweddingplanning.net/wp-admin.  Go there and log in.

Configuring WordPress

After you log in, if there is a message at the top of the screen telling you to update, do so.   Keeping your site updated is the best way to avoid getting hacked.  Click “Please update now” then “Update automatically”.  Don’t worry about backing up, yet.  We haven’t done anything worth saving.

Next, click “Settings” on the left.  Under General Settings, put the www in the WordPress and site URLs.  Click save, then log back in.

Click Posts, then Categories.  Under “Add New Category”, create one called “Misc” and click save.

Click Appearance.  This brings you to the themes page.   Click “Install Themes” and search for one you like.   I normally use Headway, but before I bought that, I used SimpleX almost exclusively.   Your goal is to have a simple theme that’s easy to maintain and easy to read.  Bells and whistles are a distraction.

Install a theme

Click “Install”, “Install now”, and “Activate”.  You now have a very basic WordPress site.

Plugins

A plugin is an independent piece of software to make independent bits of WordPress magic happen.   To install the perfect set of plugins, click Plugins on the left.    Delete “Hello Dolly”, then click “Add new”.

In the search box, enter “plugin central” and click “Search plugins”.    Plugin Central should be the first plugin in the list, so click “install”, then “ok”, then “activate plugin”.  Congratulations, you’ve just installed your first plugin.

Now, on the left, you’ll see “Plugin Central” under Plugins.  Click it.  In the Easy Plugin Installation box, copy and paste the following:

 All in One SEO Pack
 Contact Form 7
 WordPress Database Backup
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
 WP Super Cache
 Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
 date exclusion seo
 WP Policies
 Pretty Link Lite
 google xml sitemaps
 Jetpack by WordPress.com


Click “install”.


On the left, click “Installed Plugins”.   On the next screen, click the box next to “Plugins”, then select “Activate” from the dropdown and click apply.


Activate plugins


Still under Plugins, click “Akismet Configuration”.  Enter your  API key and hit “update options”.  You probably don’t have one, so click “get your key”.


Tools


The only tool I worry about is the backup.   It’s super-easy to set up.   Click “Tools”, then “Backup”.  Backup


Scroll down to “Schedule Backups”, select weekly, make sure it’s set to a good email address and click “Schedule Backup”.   I only save weekly because we won’t be adding daily content.  Weekly is safe enough, without filling up your email inbox.


Settings


There are a lot of settings we’re going to set.   This is going to make the site more usable and help the search engines find your site.  We’re going to go right down the list.   If you see a section that I don’t mention, it’s because the defaults are good enough.


Writing


Set the Default Post Category to “Misc”.


Visit this page and copy the entire list into “Update Service” box.   This will make the site ping a few dozen services every time you publish a post.   It’s a fast way to get each post indexed by Google.


Click “Save Changes”.


Discussion


Uncheck everything under “Email me whenever…” and hit save.   This lets people submit comments, without actually posting the comments or emailing me when they do so.  Every once in a while, I go manually approve the comments, but I don’t make it a priority.


Permalinks


Select “Custom structure” and enter this: /%postname%/


Click save.


All in One SEO


Set the status to “Enabled”, then fill out the site title and description.  Keep the description to about 160 characters.  This is what builds the blurb that shows up by the link when you site shows up in Google’s results.


Check the boxes for “Use categories for META keywords” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.


Click “Update Options”.


Date Exlusion SEO


Check the boxes to remove each of the dates and set the alt text to “purpose” or something.   This will suppress the date so your posts won’t look obsolete.


Hide Dates


SEO Search Terms 2


This plugin reinforces the searches that bring people to your site.   It’s kind of neat.  Skip the registration, accept the defaults and hit save.


WP Policies


Scroll to the bottom and click import.  We’ll come back to this.


WP Super Cache


Select “Caching On” and hit save.


JetPack


Across the top of the screen should be a giant banner telling you to connect to WordPress.com and set up Jetpack.  You’ll need an account on WordPress.com, so go there and set one up.   After authorizing the site, you’ll be brought back to the Jetpack configuration screen.   Click “Configure” under “WordPress.com Stats”.  Take the defaults and hit save.


Contact


On the contact configuration page, copy the code in the top section.  You’ll need this in a moment.


Contact form code


Pages


Now, we going to create a couple of static pages.   On the left, click “Pages”, then “Add new”.


Name the first page “Contact” and put the contact form code in the body of the page.  Hit publish.


Menus


Under Appearance, click “Menu”.   Enter a menu name and hit save.


Then, under “Pages”, click the box next to “Contact”, “Disclaimer”, and any other policies you’d like to display.  Hit save.


Widgets


Also under Appearance, click “Widgets”.   This is where you’ll select what will display in the sidebar.   All you have to do is drag the boxes you want from the middle of the page to the widget bar on the right.   I recommend Text, Search, Recent Posts, Popular Search Terms and Tag Cloud.  In the text box, just put some placeholder text in it, like “Product will go here”.   We’ll address this next time.


Posts


We’re not going to worry about getting posts in place, yet.    That will be the next installment.  However, the steps in the next installment could take 2 weeks to implement, and we want Google to start paying attention now.  To make that happen, we need to get a little bit of content in place.   This won’t be permanent content.  It’s only there so Google has something to see when it comes crawling.


To get this temporary, yet legal content, I use eZineArticles.  Just go search for something in your niche that doesn’t look too spammy.


Then, click “Posts”, then delete the “Hello World” post.  Click “Add new”.   Copy the eZine article, being sure to include the author box at the bottom, and hit publish.


To see your changes, you may have to go to Settings, then WP Cache and delete the cache so your site will refresh.


Congratulations!  You now have a niche blog with content.   It’s not ready to make you any money, yet, but it is ready for Google to start paying attention.    In the next installment, I’ll show you how I get real unique content and set it up so Google keeps coming back to show me the love.


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How Much Should You Tip?


Finance








Image by cemre via Flickr








This post from CNN Money has been making the rounds.    I’m getting into the game today.


With the holiday season upon us, tipping the people you work with is a tradition in some cases and actually expected in others.  Here’s what CNN came up with and my take:


    

  • Housekeeper. We don’t have one.   I’d think $75-100 would make a nice tip/Christmas bonus.  I seem to be more generous than average with my imaginary maid.  Maybe that’s because of the outfits she wears.
    • 

  • Gardener. Once again, we don’t have one.  Even if we did, I live in Minnesota and have close to a foot of snow over the patch of weeds I call my garden.  If I did have a gardener, I wouldn’t have seen him for a few months by now, anyway.   $0!
    • 

  • Mail carrier. I’ve only met my mail man a dozen times and I’ve never considered giving him a Christmas present.  Do people really do that?
    • 

  • Barber.  I don’t have one any more.   My wife has started doing my hair for me.  When I did, I tipped about 25%, but again, I wouldn’t think about a Christmas present.   I only saw him quarterly.   I don’t think my wife has a regular stylist either.  She’s just got a shop she goes to and gets whoever is available.  Is there holiday tipping protocol for that?
    • 

  • Garbage collector. No way.  Really?   I don’t know that I’ve seen the same guy twice.  Am I supposed to give a present to the anonymous, interchangeable union guy that drives past my house every Friday?
    • 

  • Newspaper carrier. One night, twelve years ago, while my wife was still working graveyard shifts, she had a hard time sleeping on her nights off.  That’s natural for 3rd shift workers.   At about 4AM, she was watching TV and saw someone run past the window.   Scared, she came to wake me up.  I handed her the phone to call the police, while I grabbed the only thing I had for self-defense and went to investigate.   I ran out on the front step–in my boxers, carrying a sword–and saw someone lurking in the neighbor’s yard across the street.   I yelled, “Y0u don’t belong here!” only to hear “I’m delivering the paper!”  That’s when I start tipping the newspaper carrier. I stopped when we canceled our subscription a few years later.   Who needs a dead tree in the morning, when there are a million news sites on the internet?
    • 



If the majority of people are giving Christmas bonuses to that many people, and are as generous as the article suggests, then I fall far to the loutish end of the bell curve. I am planning to give my virtual assistant 1/12 of the pay he’s earned this year, so that should make up for some of it, but that is an ongoing business relationship.


How do you compare when it comes to holiday tipping?




I’d Tap That: Making Life Difficult for Government Spying


Life
4th Amendment


 


Skip to the bottom if you’re familiar with PRISM and don’t want to hear any political talk and rampant violations of our Constitutional rights, but still want to protect your privacy.


For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the PRISM program is an NSA program to monitor electronic activity.


Lots of electronic activity.


The companies identified to be working with the NSA in this grand overreach include AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo! and YouTube.  For most people, that is the definition of “the internet”.  If you’re doing it online, the NSA is–or could be, at their leisure–watching.


This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory.  This is happening, and the government has admitted it.  In fact, when this broke, the executive branch’s response was along the lines of, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the guy who leaked this information.”


On top of that, the government has been demanding phone records from at least Verizon on a daily basis.


In addition, the Justice Department was just busted wiretapping Associated Press phones.


Seriously, if you put this in fiction, nobody would buy it, because it’s ridiculous in the land of the free.


As far as the people who say I’ve got nothing to worry about if I’m not doing anything wrong: shut up.  You can speak again when you give me your email passwords, bank records, and let me install a toilet cam in your house.  What are you trying to hide?


Seriously, there is such a mess of non-legislative administrative regulations that are considered felonies that the best estimate is that most people commit three felonies a day, without realizing it.


    

  • Catch your kid with a joint and neglect to call the cops?  Welcome to the federal penitentiary.
    • 

  • Use one of those pill planner things to sort prescription meds for your half-senile grandmother?  In some states, that’s a felony.
    • 



When we live in a system with so many rules that have never been voted on and our legal system refuses to consider legitimate ignorance of the law to be a defense and we have a collection of secret laws that are a felony to disclose or violate, government spying gets far more dangerous.


    

  • Many TSA guidelines are secret.
    • 

  • The Banking Secrecy Act of 1970 has a number of secret provisions.
    • 

  • FISA.
    • 



The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978(FISA) is the law the NSA is using to justify all of these data requests.  The law, that we all must obey, is being overseen by a small subcommittee in Congress, and the FISA courts are just a small subset of the judges.   The judges are signing warrants allowing the wiretaps and massive surveillance, but that is clearly unconstitutional and, hence, illegal.


The text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States is: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”


Any warrant that cannot name a place to be searched is illegal.


Any warrant that cannot describe the person to be monitored is illegal.


Any warrant that is not backed by probable cause is illegal.


Tell me how “I want to watch what everyone is saying on Facebook and seize all of the data” meets any of those criteria.


Bueller?


Wiretapping the AP is a serious violation of the First Amendment, too.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”


“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”


Monitoring the press in case somebody breaks a story the government doesn’t want broken is crap.


How can we petition the government for redress of grievances that they call a felony if the company discloses the violation to us?  It’s self-serving circular crap.


When you throw the IRS harassing charities working for the “wrong” politics, you start to pine for the good old days of Nixon-level fair play and integrity.


To be fair, FISA got nasty with the Patriot Act, which was an abomination enacted by a different political party.  Hey, Washington, next time try to remember that your laws will someday be administered by your political enemies, k?  (NSA: I trust you’ll pass the message for me?)


Political talk is over.  How do we stop the government snooping?


There are four main pieces to discuss, based on the scandalous Constitutional violations reported recently.


1.  Social media monitoring.   There’s nothing to this.  If you post things on Facebook, the government sees it and knows it’s you.  Don’t post anything you don’t want broadcast to the police, your grandmother, and your priest.


2.  Internet browsing.  There is very little that is secure on the internet.   The government can subpoena your ISP and get any records they keep.  Unless you go anonymous and encrypted.  Welcome to TOR.  The Onion Router is a system that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it all over the world.   Once you enter TOR, nothing you do can be tracked, until your internet request leave the TOR system.   The system is not centrally owned or controlled, so nobody in the system can track what you are doing.


For example, if I use the TOR browser to search Wikipedia, a snoopy NSA goon could tell I’m using it, and they could tell there was a request from the TOR system to Wikipedia, but they can’t tie one request to the other.  If I’m dumb and log into Facebook, I lose that anonymous shield.


That’s solid protection from anyone watching your internet traffic.


How do you use it?


Easy.  Just install the Tor Bundle.  When you want the NSA to stop snooping over your shoulder because you want to do a search on erectile dysfunction, you launch TOR and the TOR browser and search without having to share your embarrassing secrets.


3.  Email.  Email is easily the least secure means you can communicate.  When you send an email, that message is in plain text, and it bounces from server to server until it reaches the recipient.  Any of the involved servers can keep a log of the traffic and read your email.


Never, ever, ever, ever put anything incriminating or important in an email.  Don’t send credit card numbers, your social security number, or the address of your meth lab.


But what if you want to have a dirty conversation with your spouse without letting the sick voyeurs at the NSA listen to you ask your wife what she’s wearing and how would she like it torn off?


Use PGP.  OpenPGP is a free software encryption program that is basically impossible to decrypt.   It’s known as public-key encryption, which means that anybody can encrypt a message to you that only you can read.


It’s like magic.


To use PGP, the easy way(for Windows users) is to get Gpg4win.  Install that, then open Kleopatra.  This will let you generate your encryption key.  You do that by:


    

  • Clicking File, then New Certificate
    • 

  • Click Create  Personal OpenPGP key pair
    • 

  • Enter your name and email, then click next, then “Create Key”.  Enter your passphrase when asked.
    • 



You now have a set of PGP keys.  To get your public key that others can use to send you messages, right-click your certificate and select “Export certificates”.  Pick a path to save the certificate, then do so.  You can open this file with notepad to get your public key, or you can email the file out.  There is no need to worry about security with this file.


You will end up with something that looks like my public key here:


—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32)


mQENBFGyPPkBCAC8zc5B7srG/ZyRMpokP3KyIMd9GA4n94wT89sP/yWFylbTKXDM

S2vC0yXh4zDJshJ1odj+spJGeYaXHCJM21buzKYf0gZsUGIbkVZWRy8ch16+umFl

DuTMaCN5Yue6ehGsjH8N+4q7pmXSlyRXRXzG0A4d9de4SQnfO65e1CMaQhFMpJu0

mXK8KFLqJ560efzlTTZvN3o5RfxYhtB3ODoDfkGeBLIxGVYn1kYbowTcvwymATOb

iSHwNfH+vY+kuTnrG9ilLyprDKwAF+ErD87WP0pLKVIQvoMV69VHEoRhHqK45iJG

j0ZhtTA4emnGZtCNsdfPLUdws1k9SNeIpd9pABEBAAG0H0phc29uIDxqYXNvbkB3

YWxiZXJnb25saW5lLmNvbT6JATkEEwECACMFAlGyPPkCGw8HCwkIBwMCAQYVCAIJ

CgsEFgIDAQIeAQIXgAAKCRDRFT/09vSoj10ECACVE/ngHyzX1lnMlucW4Rx8b8ii

KK8v/AmVkrJZgI3umuJn906sGGA8fNjxUGYH5fX6R7Diud4SEnZWADSq5pAImOv+

qZnPdpJKjMaY6qr+trr0DGsCoen+TxzM7rClBz3TTURI5SbySojHvQoEiCHHPBw1

yY3+leoUzLmso98ocA2lY4Iuvr7/fAzuQEFhBdxxLtS7mDWdmUca+A6GsrCr4LZ7

fpovRCNv07BoAa5ql+GrPOcsIcLwSoEtkhjCo4vPDeveqsnLT0W7N9YBPiGMpHPm

0oFxniC6/eWtI+3C8QFYO3X+CC5yTYpqJJ0BJWhXjiqYmr290d3AN+hYck3T

=fHba

—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–


To get your private key, that you can use with any number of plugins for your email client, right-click on your certificate and select “Export secret keys.”


You can either use PGP as a plugin for your email client, or you can use Kleopatra’s feature “Sign/encrypt files”.  To do that, write your message in a file, then select the feature inside Kleopatra.  You’ll end up with an encrypted file you can attach to your email that snoopy government man can’t read.


4.  Phone calls.  This would appear to be harder, since your phone is largely out of your control.   There’s nothing practical you do about a landline, except to avoid saying anything sensitive.  On your cell phone, you have options, assuming you use a smartphone.


For Android users, it’s free an easy.  Install Redphone.  If you place a call with Redphone, it checks to see if the caller also uses Redphone.  If he does, it places an encrypted call over your data plan to the other phone.   Nobody can listen in to an encrypted call.   The same company also makes a program for texting.


For iPhone users, you’re stuck with Silent Circle for $10/month,  which may be a better option, since there is support for more devices, including Android.   It was designed by the guy who designed PGP and handles texting and email, too.


That’s it.


There you are, the whats, whys, and hows of modern, hassle-light, private communications.   Doing what we can to foil bad government programs is our patriotic duty.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


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