Mr. Larson said that by some estimates, with the default encryption scheme<br />that Apple uses, “you’d have to have a supercomputer crunching day and night for years to be able to unlock a single computer.”<br />He said the best way to destroy data was not to delete it,<br />because it could potentially be resurrected from a hard drive, but to encode it in “a secure form of cryptography.”<br />Signal is one of the most popular apps for those who want to protect their text messages.<br />“When I use the term ‘attacker’ I mean anyone trying to access your data whom you haven’t given<br />express permission to,” he wrote, “whether it’s a hacker, a corporation or even a government.”<br />In an interview, Mr. Larson walked us through some of the basic steps he recommended.<br />Mr. Larson recommends password managers, which help store many passwords, with one master password.<br />“Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider or the websites you visit.”<br />Mr. Larson recommended Tor in his article, a browser that allows for private web activity.<br />Mr. Marlinspike said the presidential election had spurred a lot of interest in Signal, leading to a “substantial increase in users.”<br />When asked to speculate why that was, Mr. Marlinspike simply said, “Donald Trump is about to be in control of the most powerful, invasive<br />and least accountable surveillance apparatus in the world.”<br />Signal is available for both Android and iOS.
