One bit of advice was given by Bobby Inman, who was the director of the NSA in the late `70s and early `80s:
“My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself. It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”That would be smart, but they'll never do it. Spies airing out their own dirty laundry goes against their DNA.
One of the things that I think is interesting is how much of German pique over being spied on may be due, in part, to the fact that the NSA lumps the Germans in with a tertiary group of friends known as the "14 Eyes." They wanted to at least be in the "9 Eyes" group with the French, if not being added as the only non-Anglophone nation in the "Five Eyes". The World of Spooks seems to operates akin to a bunch of high school cliques.
Still, one thing should be considered: How badly has the NSA broken the Internet? You'd have to be several kinds of fool to trust confidential documents to a cloud server. Email is not secure, not unless you're using encryption. And the NSA is investing heavily in quantum computing, which theoretically would allow them to break any encryption scheme. It's a safe bet that they've penetrated every videoconferencing system as well.
The winners may be the airlines and the Post Office. The airlines because any business-sensitive discussions can now only be conducted face-to-face. The Post Office because writing letters may be the most secure method of written discourse left. Sure, the government can intercept your letters, but they have to physically do it. The NSA can't, as of yet, set up their big vacuum cleaner and suck up your letters.
For now, unless you are using OpenPGP or something similar, think of sending emails or buying things online or doing online banking as if everything you did appeared on one of those electronic billboards next to the highway.
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Have you bought stamps from a post-office vending machine, lately? They came with a 2-d barcode, the date of purchase, and a long number that appears to identify the location of purchase. And the vending machine only takes credit cards.
So the Post Office has been infiltrated, too.
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