How to protect your PC from PRISM surveillance

Avoid using popular Web services

This is an easy one. If you're concerned about the government watching your moves online, simply avoid making Microsoft Bing and Google your search engines of choice; try DuckDuckGo instead. The site promises not to track or store your searches, which should provide some degree of confidence that you're not being tracked online. Both reports from  the Post and the Guardian indicate that the PRISM program is expanding, although for now DuckDuckGo seems to be safe.

Naturally, this also means ditching a Gmail or Hotmail account, and deleting your accounts from those sites. Instead, it's time to think about laying low and skipping around services that you might have forgotten about: Mapquest for maps, for example. You may as well stop social networking altogether, unless it happens to be direct, person-to-person communications.

And there's no sense in surfing using Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari, either. Sure, there's Firefox and Opera, but the PCWorld's review of the Tor browser shows it to be a slow but anonymous way of browsing the Internet.

Ditch your smartphone