How to protect your PC from PRISM surveillance
Let's face it: the first and most obvious thing you should do to secure your PC is to lock it down from malware. Our tests from January provide you the best antimalware solutions, empirically tested to ensure that no Trojan or other worm sneaks inside your PC and provides its own spying eyes on your online activities. Your PC should be your castle, and antimalware is the first line of defense. Frankly, if you're concerned about the safety and well-being of your PC, you should have taken care of this long ago.
Tie it up together with a hard password knot
The last thing you'll want to do is make sure that all of your encrypted services are tied up neatly with a unique, easy-to-remember-but-impossible-to-crack passphrase. PCWorld has some tips to manage passwords, including what's coming down the pipe. But the best practice right now seems to be to find a good password manager like LastPass, and create your own unique password. Bruce Schneier's "Schneier scheme" recommends that you create a passphrase ("Man, those six flights of stairs to my New York apartment were killer.") and then abstract it, possibly with the first letters. ("M,tsfostmNYawk.") It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than random words and phrases that can be easily guessed.
Will these tips make your PC PRISM proof No, not necessarily. But if you're concerned about the recent PRISM disclosures, they'll go a long way to help you sleep better at night--outside of smashing your PC to bits, distributing the pieces randomly among a dozen scrap heaps, and moving to the woods, that is.