Our thoughts on the anniversary of Snowden’s first revelations

It’s been one year since Edward Snowden’s first revelations about the mass surveillance conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency.

Since then, revelation after revelation has emerged about how governments are spying on individuals on a massive scale.

Notable revelations since then:

• Through the NSA’s QUANTUM program, the NSA plans to infect millions of computers with malware by, among other things, disguising itself as a fake Facebook server (this drew the ire of Mark Zuckerberg, who posted on angry response on Facebook)

• Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) also has unfettered access to the world’s communications

• Just last week, we learned that the NSA is collecting millions of faces from web images.

You can find an exhaustive timeline of the revelations here.

Snowden’s revelations have brought security and privacy to the fore. And with regular Internet users plagued by security vulnerabilities like Apple’s gotofail bug and Heartbleed, people are more aware of Internet privacy and security issues than ever before. As they should be: our governments are spying on us indiscriminately.

As we said in response to the first NSA revelations, using a VPN is only part of the solution.

That’s why we’re encouraging you to check out Reset the Net, whose awesome Privacy Pack gives you “the easiest ways to protect yourself and make mass surveillance more difficult," including suggestions for encrypted chat clients, GPG tools to encrypt your email, and more.

Please take today to remind your friends and family that they can take active measures to protect their own privacy—whether through using a VPN, or any of the free software in Reset the Net’s privacy pack.