EliteFitness.com secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based email - we call it Stealth Messaging. It\'s free, you can get it here, and you need it more than ever if you want to keep your butt out of trouble.

Your privacy is under attack. It\'s under attack from hackers trying to steal your personal information. It\'s under attack from your boss working overtime to keep a close eye on you. And it\'s under attack from our government\'s ever expanding efforts to fight the "war on terrorism."

Think about the computer you\'re using to read this letter right now. I\'ll bet you don\'t have to think hard to realize that you and everybody else has something on your PC that could get you in big trouble if slipped into the wrong hands. Fortunately, you\'re not powerless. Smart people everywhere are fighting back and staying one step ahead of big brother\'s watchful eye. They\'re encrypting and securely moving their sensitive personal information, emails, and files offshore.

In this week\'s EliteFitness.com News, I\'ll share with you some new and startling developments in the multiple attacks against your privacy. And I\'ll tell you more about how to get a free secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based email account and file storage and why you need it now more than ever.

Your Boss

Unless you\'ve been living under a rock, you\'ve probably heard the horror stories of employees who lose their job over an email they sent. You\'ve probably also heard the stories about companies that wanted to fire someone and trolled an employee\'s email in order to find something - anything - that could be used to justify the firing.

The E-mail-scanning software that your boss is using has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. In the past, the software would typically check e-mail messages against a list of keywords, such as the four letter variety. Now, such programs can be customized for each company, and often look out for the name of a company CEO, competitors or product code names, in addition to inappropriate language and references to sex. The systems can also track if you\'re copying or deleting files - or not doing much at all.

One maker of this sort of monitoring software is a company called MessageGate. Ironically, the MessageGate monitoring software was developed by Boeing for use in house, then later, it was spun off into a separate company. Boeing still uses MessageGate. You can only wonder if the MessageGate software was what caught Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher\'s salacious email and ultimately resulted in his firing.

Hackers

On Tuesday February 5, 2005, the ChoicePoint corporation admitted that thousands of sensitive personal records of thousands of individuals had been stolen by a hacker. In 2003, another consumer data company, Axciom, suffered a hacking incident as well. On behalf of federal, state, and local government agencies, both ChoicePoint and Axciom maintain various records about you. Some of this data includes social security numbers, driving records, sex-offender lists, and FBI lists of wanted criminals and suspected terrorists.

The fact that the records were stolen by criminals posing as legitimate businesses is bad enough. But to make matters worse, according to Reuters, U.S. investigators told ChoicePoint that their databases had been compromised and that tens of thousands of consumers were vulnerable to identity theft back in October of 2004. But CheckPoint waited until February of 2005 to let anyone know what had happened. If you\'re one of the unlucky ones who\'s identity was stolen, your credit rating should be in the toilet about now.

All this data is being gathered to fight the "war on terror." If I was the Director of the Department of Homeland Security, I would be extremely pissed off that the companies the government hired to do its data mining are so vulnerable to hackers. I\'m sure that the terrorist cells active in the United States would benefit from knowing that they are on the government\'s watch lists. And given the careless manner that ChoicePoint, Axiom, and other companies do the government\'s dirty work of sifting through yours and my personal information, that conclusion may not be such a remote possibility.

Currently, firms such as ChoicePoint and Axciom, along with other data gathering firms (e.g. credit bureaus) are not obligated to accept responsibility for the errors in your personal records that they maintain. And, they are not held responsible for damage done to you in the aftermath of incidents such as what occurred at ChoicePoint and Axciom.

The Government

In January of this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), a group dedicated to defending your liberties and privacy on the Internet, filed a Freedom of Information Act inquiry with the FBI and other Justice Department offices to ascertain if the U.S. government is spying on your email and web surfing habits.

The answer is almost a certain yes, and the EFF is seeking documents to learn if the government is using the provisions of the USA Patriot Act to collect information about the contents of your email and your online activities without a search warrant.

It would seem reasonable to expect that your online habits are private. Yet, the Justice Department refuses to confirm whether it collects or believes it is authorized to collect information about what you\'re doing online.

The USA Patriot Act was hastily passed by Congress shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It pretty much tramples the bill of rights and curtails many of the civil liberties we are supposed to enjoy as part of the "war on terror."

As part of the act, the government can monitor your Web surfing records, use roving wiretaps to monitor phone calls you make if you are "proximate" to a primary person being tapped, access your ISP\'s records about you, and monitor the private records of people involved in legitimate protests.

The Justice Department already claims the new definitions allow them to collect email and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. But, the agency has not been forthcoming about Web surveillance. It will not say whether it believes URLs (a web address like //www.elitefitness.com) can be collected about you, despite the fact that URLs clearly reveal exactly what you\'re looking at on the Web.

The Patriot Act was passed to fight terrorism, but, it is not limited to terrorism. For example, government spying on suspected "computer trespassers" requires no court order. Wiretaps are now allowed for any suspected violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, opening the door to government spying on any computer user.

The Patriot Act also gives ISPs the authority to release private data if a person\'s life is in danger without a court order. The Justice Department does not publish statistics on the number of times it has accessed such information, according to its report to the congressional committee.

Further, the Patriot Act requires domestic ISPs to comply with secret "National Security Letters" from the FBI. These letters can request information about you including your home address, the telephone calls that you have made, your email subject lines and the logs of the websites that you visited. And even the privacy statements of the three major ISPs, AOL, MSN, and Earthlink, give them permission to intercept your email and monitor what you\'re looking at online.

It gets worse, the Bush administration is pushing to ratify an international Internet agreement known as the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention. Basically, signatories to this agreement will be required to mutually share your personal information with each other. The agreement makes it mandatory for each participating nation to grant new powers of search and seizure to its law enforcement authorities, including the power to force ISPs to preserve your usage records and to monitor your online activities as they occur.

If it is approved by the Senate, experts say, police would be required to cooperate in "mutual assistance requests" from police in other nations "to the widest extent possible."

For example, the section on real-time monitoring of Internet activity would mean that the FBI could be asked to order an ISP like AOL to spy on a political activist in Ukraine or a union organizer in Latin America. We can only hope that this does not get passed.

What can you do?

There are numerous steps you can take to ensure your privacy, but first and foremost is securing and encrypting the email you send and receive. And the second is moving your email messages and sensitive files offshore where they will be impervious to US subpoena. The easiest way to do this is with EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging that uses 2,048-bit encryption for total privacy, security and peace of mind.

EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging works like a yahoo.com or hotmail.com email account. You get a cool email address like [email protected] and you send and receive email through a web page - in this case, www.elitefitness.com/mail.

By contrast with yahoo for example, EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging keeps your online communications private and secure. Not even an EliteFitness.com employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted email, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer. An EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging account lets you communicate in total security with any other hushmail.com, cyber-rights.com, PGP, and of course other elitefitness.com email users. In addition, our mail servers are located offshore making your private communications impervious to subpoena.

You might wonder why our email system is so secure. The reason is that the source code to the Hush Encryption Engine, which provides key management, encryption, and digital signature functionality for EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging, is freely available to anyone who wants to look at it. For techies, here\'s a link where you can read all about the key technology that secures your EliteFitness.com email.

In addition to secure encrypted web-based email, there are a few other noteworthy features. First, there\'s Enhanced Spam Control. All EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging accounts now benefit from improved Spam Detection, allowing for easy filtering and disposal of likely spam. Highly flexible, EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging spam filters allow users to permit specific senders and domains, accept only encrypted e-mail for greater security, and automatically authenticate valid e-mail senders and thereby completely eliminate spam from automated bulk delivery agents! Log into your account, click the Spam Control tab at the top right of the screen and follow the directions given to take control of your inbox and help eliminate spam from the Internet.

EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging is pleased to announce the release of Online Document Storage through the familiar EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging interface. Uploading and storing your files couldn\'t be easier - and all files are encrypted using the same Industrial Strength 2,048-bit encryption as your EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging e-mail for total privacy, security and peace of mind. Secure Document Storage is available to all EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging users at no extra charge. And, EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging users can now share their Secure Document folders with other EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging users at the click of a button.

The IMAP Access service allows users to download their email to their local hard drive so that they can use Outlook or a similar program to manage their mail. And, all EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging users can now access External POP3 accounts from within EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging, at no extra cost! To enable a POP3 account, login to your EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging account, access the Preferences menu, and click on External Email (POP) Accounts.

Finally, EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging users can use the new Hush Messenger. This is the chat and instant messaging program that\'s free to download and use! All chat messages sent with Hush Messenger are protected by 2048-bit Open PGP encryption as well as 128-bit SSL encryption for maximum security.

Hush Messenger will also notify you when new email arrives in your EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging account! Using Hush Messenger requires that you have an active EliteFitness.com Stealth Messaging account. Here\'s a link to download the latest version of the Hush Messenger, and here\'s a link to get your free EliteFitness.com secure encrypted email account today.

And finally, here\'s a link where you can discuss this article, internet privacy, and EliteFitness.com secure, encrypted, web-based email on the EliteFitness.com Forums.

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