It’s an era of Mass Surveillance, where Encryption has become more important today for all of us than any other time in the History. But the trouble is that Crypto programs are too hard for Non-Internet-Savvy to implement and use.

Time is loudly announcing the need to switch to some alternatives that provide end-to-end encryption for communication between two devices in order to keep your personal data away from NSA's prying eyes and respect your Privacy.

But, many services, including Facebook's messaging application, don’t support encryption and therefore are weak in providing security of our online data, which could result in data breach either by cyber criminals or by our own Government under surveillance programs.

Because Facebook's messaging application doesn't support end-to-end encryption, an Open-source and most popular crypto chat-encryption application called 'Cryptocat' has made it possible to chat with your Facebook friends and relatives over an encrypted environment.

Cryptocat is a tool that allows secure and encrypted chat which is easy and accessible for everyone. The app is well known for bringing encrypted communications to the masses and is very popular among human rights activists and journalists around the world.

GOOD NEWS FOR FACEBOOK USERS

In General, The Facebook Inbox Messages or Chat between the two are protected by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption over HTTPS Channel, but the problem is it only encrypts data between user and Facebook, but the company has access to the plain text of those conversations directly from their database, which potentially could be provided to law enforcement authorities under certain circumstances or court orders.

Felt the need of encrypting chats for roughly 1.2 billion Facebook users, Cryptocat has announced its latest update which includes the full encryption for Facebook inbox messages.

“Cryptocat’s mission is to make encrypted chat accessible and easy to use. With Cryptocat celebrating its third birthday (already!), we're happy to announce the new Encrypted Facebook Chat feature in the latest Cryptocat 2.2 update,” Cryptocat's founder, Nadim Kobeissi wrote in a blog post.

Finally, Cryptocat solves the half of the Privacy related problem by offering end-to-end encryption between the Facebook users over Chat. Cryptocat application uses the Facebook account APIs to work.

If two individuals are using Cryptocat for chatting, Facebook will only know who is talking to whom over an encrypted conversation and when. But, it doesn’t allow Facebook or any other server, including Cryptocat’s own, to see the users’ plain text messages -- that's the beauty of end-to-end encryption technology.

"There's no harm in Cryptocat using this already-given metadata to allow these users to set up encrypted chats," Kobeissi wrote. "The usability benefits of being able to quickly see which friends are online and ready for an encrypted chat remain overly substantial for those users."

A BAD NEWS

But Facebook couldn’t digest this news and the social network giant has made clear its intention of shutting down its Chat API/XMPP Services by April 30th 2015, so you have almost a year to enjoy Cryptocat encryption for secure chatting with your Facebook friends.

DOWNLOAD CRYPTOCAT
Cryptocat 2.2 with Encrypted Facebook Chat is already available as a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Opera and as an iPhone app for Apple iPhones, whereas Android is on the way. Also by the end of this week, the updates will be available for Firefox and Mac desktop as well. So, almost anyone can download Cryptocat and start chatting with friends.

Ex-NSA Director Admits 'We Kill People Based On Metadata' with Drone Strike

We All now know about the existence of the extensive metadata collection program by U.S National Security Agency (NSA), which creates an intimate repository of our lives -- whom we love, whom we’re friends with, where we work, whom we call, when we you, how long we talk over the calls, and how often calls between the two parties are made and even the your interactions on social networking sites.

Although U.S Government always argues that Metadata doesn't record the actual content (of your call) and it is used for NSA's automated analysis, but should we be worried?

You are unique in the world and therefore your metadata too. So anyone with knowledge of the subject knows that analyzing terabytes of metadata can easily reveal far more details about a person’s life than ever before.

Worldwide debate on mass surveillance still was not finished yet, but today is a new alarming report revealed that US government murdering people around the world based solely on their metadata.

Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted that Government select targets on the basis of metadata for killing people with Drone Strike around the world.

During a recent debate between Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole and General Michael Hayden, concerning the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs at Johns Hopkins University, General Hayden made the comments, "it is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata. But that’s not what we do with this metadata,”.Though immediately after realizing the gravity of the admission he had just made, he tries to qualify the statement to "But that’s not what we do with this metadata".

“So NSA gets phone records, gets them from the telephone company, been getting them since October of 2001 from one authority or another, puts them in a lockbox… and under very strict limitations can access the lockbox,” Hayden said.

In an article posted at New York Review of Books, Professor David Cole elaborated, “Under the USA Freedom Act, the NSA would be prohibited from collecting phone and Internet data en masse. Instead, such records would remain with the telephone and Internet companies… and the NSA would only be authorized to approach those companies on an individual, case-by-case basis… and only when it could first satisfy the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is reasonable suspicion that a particular person, entity, or account is linked to an international terrorist or a representative of a foreign government or political organization,” said Cole.

So, Now will you still make “phew” reactions that it is “just your metadata”?