3. Encrypt your communications

Besides assuring your sources that your communications can’t be intercepted by anyone, it also ensures them that nobody can find tracks of it even in service providers servers.

To secure your conversations on your phone you’ll need to download an end-to-end text message encryption software, the most secure way to do it is to get Signal on Android or iOS.

This free app is aimed to make impossible a communication interception because every message or phone call is fully encrypted by strong algorithms. You can even setup a password to prevent access to your conversations from anyone that doesn’t know this password. It uses internet connection so your discussion partner needs to use the same app to gain its benefits. The Android version can optionally function as an SMS app.

A very important point about this app is that it doesn’t provide any backdoor, so even governments couldn’t obtain access to your privacy.

On macOS, Windows and Linux computers you can use Ricochet to have a secure instant messaging software, it does not encrypt your conversations but it uses the Tor network to ensure a complete privacy. It is completely free and open-source so everyone can review the source code.

“Nobody knows who you are, who you talk to, or what you say. […] There are no servers to monitor, censor, or hack.” — Ricochet main page

Each time you exit the application, all of your conversations are instantly erased so that the messages you shared with your discussion partner remain safe.

Alternatively and if you have good informatics knowledge you could also open a private communication tunnel secured by GPG using the command lines.

But you also need to encrypt your emails, to do that you have many choices :

If you want to use another emailing service than the one you actually use :

The best solution is to create an account on ProtonMail, it’s a free and open-source web mail client that automatically secure your emails by using end-to-end encryption. The company does not store any IP logs and is located in Switzerland, where privacy laws are very restrictive. The service is available on Android, iOS and on the web.

They also provide a commercial software (ProtonMail Bridge) that can connect your ProtonMail account to any mail client on your computer, but you’ll have to be a paid user to use it.

If you want to secure your actual emailing service, there are plenty of options :

You could download the GPG Mail on macOS computers that implant a functionality to the Apple Mail app enabling it to encrypt conversations between two people but it’s not free and you’ll have to pay 24$ to use it after the expiration of a one month trial.

Another option is to download the Thunderbird free and open-source mail client in association with Enigmail that works with the free and open-source version of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), a plugin that enables the encryption of your emails for free. This software is available on macOS, Windows, and Linux computers, it still remains the best option you could find to secure electronic mails.

To encrypt emails on Android you can use K9-Mail in association with OpenKeychain, a key manager based on OpenPGP that enables K9-Mail to secure your communications. Both are free and open-source.

If you use iOS you could use iPG Mail or oPenGP that works like OpenKeychain and can enable encryption on the proprietary iOS Mail app, but you’ll need to pay 1.99$ for iPG or 4.99$ for oPenGP. You could also use Canary Mail that works like K9-Mail and OpenKeychain at the same time but the price is 9.99$ for iOS users. These are closed source and commercial apps.

Unfortunately, there is actually no free and open-source alternative for iOS users, the best option is to create an account on ProtonMail and to use their iOS app.

You can also encrypt emails without using any software but a plugin, Mailvelope, for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers that enables the encryption of emails through web mail clients such as Gmail, Outlook or any other emailing service. This plugin is free, open-source and based on the same standard than Enigmail, OpenPGP.