This is an area and topic very close to my heart; the issue of protecting our personal information and activities is a hot-button topic now, for good reason. There is great threat to all of us from criminal or other nefarious elements that seek to invade our privacy for gain, whether it be monetary, business or even political. However, we also face increasing surveilance worldwide from our government agencies. In the US, the NSA has been revealed to be (possibly illegally) conduncting surveilance of their own citizens within the country. Here in Canada, there is no such law guaranteeing that we will not be observed (in fact, we can expect to be surreptiously monitored by government spy or police agencies). Even back home in Jamaica, the possiblity of privacy-invasion by non-criminal agencies has shown a multifold increase, due to our signatory status on multiple anti-terrorism, anti-criminal treaties that (strangely) provide government with recourse for surveilance and interdiction of non-criminals as well! Personally, I think any clear-thinking individual should be investigating avenues for retaining even a vestige of privacy protection in this world. Enter TrueCrypt , a very interesting program that I’ve been reviewing for a couple of days. It encrypts a filesystem in Windows, making it unreadable by unathourized users. Another really great direction that I’ve seen is the use of encrypted filesystems in Linux – Freshmeat has a great article on this. Look into this, it may be important for your personal protection!