I am not surprised to see no mention of NSA. Although certainly unfortunate news it is to be expected. Law enforcement are currently operating largely in the past, modern technological advancements are fucking their ability to carry out surveillance. This unit will likely be focusing on developing zero day exploits to by pass proxies and encryption. Remember, you can have unbreakable encryption and be behind a billion mixes and it doesn't mean shit if the FBI roots you. This is the type of technique they are going to be forced to use if they want to be able to intercept any data once the point comes that essentially all communications are encrypted. You can perfectly counter their ability to perform a remote intercept of communications by using airgaps. The best airgap is simple, you download encrypted messages on a machine connected to the internet, then you type the ciphertext over by hand to a machine that is not connected to the internet. You could also burn the ciphertexts to a one time use CD to transfer them to the machine not connected to the internet, but you will need to type messages you encrypt into the machine that is connected to the internet or else the airgap will be broken. ECC will be nicer than RSA, the following key has the security parameters of a 15,000+ bit RSA key but is obviously much smaller it produces ciphertexts that are much smaller also (it is also much faster), so easier to type things across with airgaps. Using airgaps prevents 100% of pure hacking based intercept technology, and that is the sort of shit the FBI is probably developing with this unit. ciphertext of the above sentence with 256 bit symmetric and (what is equal to) 16k bit RSA security: here it is with GPG default equal security parameters The other thing to worry about is them hacking you and discovering your IP address. Then they can get your plaintexts also, potentially with local TEMPEST or other fancy 'keylogging' technology. The best bet against FBI being able to deanonymize you by hacking is to use hardware based isolation techniques, run Tor on one machine (it can be cheap as hell) with a connection to the internet. This machine should be a very minimalist installation of a very secure OS, I would suggest OpenBSD. You then connect to the Tor machine with the machine that you use for browsing the web, and it forwards all the traffic it gets on to Tor and returns the reply. Now if your browser machine is rooted the attacker can still be prevented from getting your real IP address unless they can also pwn Tor running on a minimalist OpenBSD box, of course with full ASLR. I believe you can even isolate Tor with software techniques and make it so even if Tor is compromised the attacker can not get your real IP address unless they break the isolation (I have heard others talk of this technique but never implemented it myself), although they will always be able to trace you to your entry guards in this case. You will also need to use firewall rules to prevent them from just switching to entry guards they own to get your real IP address. Not the best to be traced to your entry guards, but essentially the same security as provided by a hidden service so maybe not so bad. Airgaps + hardware isolation with security oriented operating systems will give the FBI a run for their money, NSA would still cut through it though.