> Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA A lot of crypto nerds have this fantasy of "NSA-proofing" themselves or their information. That's near impossible.

> Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA A lot of crypto nerds have this fantasy of "NSA-proofing" themselves or their information. That's near impossible. If the NSA cares enough about someone specifically to use, say, tools from the TAO catalog, they will be able to find out what they want to know. (See http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html ). The FBI also has powerful targeted surveillance tools. Targeted surveillance is often legitimate, anyway. Authorities have suspicion that someone is, say, planning an attack or running a cartel, or someone is a suspect in murder case. It's good that powerful tool exist to find the truth. I think the right goal is to stop mass surveillance. Mass surveillance the continuous monitoring of whole populations at a time. Mass surveillance is illegitimate and a threat to liberal democracy. That leads to a totally different approach. Moving your own personal email server to Iceland does nothing at all to prevent mass surveillance (and honestly doesn't protect you from targeted surveillance either, as others have pointed out). To roll back mass surveillance, both in the US and around the world, we need tools that are clean and simple and easy to use, even for people who have never heard of a "key" or a "cipher" and don't care what those are. We need to make things like end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, and metadata security available by default. Signal and WhatsApp are the biggest success stories so far. Moxie is the boss.