Silicon Cognition

2016: Silicon Cognition

Several years ago I flogged the term “Cloud-Based Episodic Parallel Processing” and tossed c-bepp.org onto the Internet with a concise manifesto of a vision: a cloud API for applications running on PCs and other puny computers to be called when massive computation (or computation on massive amounts of data) is required.

My focus was applications like personal medicine, where a patient’s symptoms and genomic information (for example, the DNA sequence of their tumor) could be correlated against a vast database of similar sufferers, and the best course of therapy for the particular patient selected based on outcomes amassed over time and the spectrum of therapies that had been tried.

I likened the process to a hybrid car, which carries a modest gas engine of barely sufficient power for light-demand usage but also an electric drive to add bursts of power in high-demand situations.

C-BEPP received limited interest at the time— some interesting conversations, some expressions of interest, a few amens— but ultimately it didn’t gel.  Wasn’t actionable.  The necessary software constructs seemed unapproachable.

But tonight it struck me: in the end, it actually did gel in a sense— with a twist.  Driving home, my watch guided me along the roadways, gently tapping me when turns were necessary: tap, tap, tap for right; tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap for left.  It did this by harnessing a sort of episodic cloud-based processing: Here was the puniest of personal computers, drawing intelligence from a distant cauldron of immense compute power.

The twist is that there is an intermediary I had not foreseen: the smartphone.  Powerful computers in their own right by any classical measure, these always-connected, sensor-festooned, multi-networked wonders provide valuable preprocessing and situational information to the distant brain based in the cloud.  My phone interacted with me via the watch, and it corresponded with the cloud-brain, serving as interlocutor and conductor of the orchestra of data to and from my wrist.

In return, the cloud-brain gained insight from observing me: knots of traffic I encountered, my speed, diversions and alternate routes I chose to take, and so on.  Perhaps even biometric information from my watch caught its interest, since that was available too.  Who knows, if I wrenched the wheel sharply, it might even have noted an obstacle in the road.

My eyes were its.

Silicon ganglions

Throughout history, successful innovations have often paralleled biological systems.  Airplanes possess similarities to birds; submarines to fish.  Advanced coatings draw heavily from nanostructures on plant-leaves, unwettable by even the heaviest rain.  Camera imaging chips draw from the design of the retina, and on and on.  It's called biomimetics.

So here we see an emerging compute paradigm similar to the biological structure known as a ganglion: a mini-brain, a peripheral intelligence interposed between transducers in the field and central processors in the cloud.

My phone's role in my evening commute struck me.  In 2016, it is the ganglion in a diffused intelligence in which I am a participant, beneficiary, transducer… and sensor.

Silicon Intelligence

Looking back at 2015, perhaps the most remarkable thing I read was a Google Research blog post entitled “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks” (http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html).

This described recent work in correlative recognition using the specialized compute structure called a neural network.  These systems learn by observing large data sets.  Their predictive capability self-adjusts over time via observation and feedback (http://www.dspguide.com/ch26/4.htm).

And, when idle, they dream.  That Google Research blog post presented otherworldly phantasms imagined by the neural networks when ruminating over image databases.

Haunting stuff, not least because the phantasms seem so brilliantly dream-like.  The stuff of a dawning intelligence.  The stuff of nightmares.

What recognitions, then, might such an intelligence draw if fed something close to the sum of human thought and behavior?  In 2016, I think we will begin to find out, because portals to that exist today.  They are specialized in various ways: consider the databases of a Google, an Amazon, an NSA.  Immense insights await the hungry brain capable of observing it all.

Silicon Consciousness 

There’s more.  The difference between intelligence and consciousness is simply being-in-the-now.  Observing and correlating databased truth is one thing, and it allows inferences and recognitions to be drawn.  But observing and correlating the world as it happens is quite another thing, and this is the natural agenda of Internet of Things as it unfolds, whether its participants are aware of it or not.  This is the stuff of consciousness, not just intelligence.

And, in 2016, it is here.

Silicon Precognition

Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story, “The Minority Report” (later turned into an engaging movie), centered on mutants capable of foreseeing crime.  In 2016 we need no mutants: we have the germ of silicon consciousness animated by silicon intelligence, leavened by a critical mass of human thought and behavior, and illuminated by a real-time sensorial feed from exponentiating millions of sensor-equipped minions like me, just going about our days.  Given such a vast and dense sense of history and now present, the leap to foreseeing the future is a minor one.

And an inevitable one.

Consider again who those big-data players are.

Consider again the real value of big data in 2016.

Biomimetics, writ large

Throughout history, successful innovations have often paralleled biological systems.  And so the beehive enjoys a collective consciousness, animated and leavened and illuminated by its throngs of worker bees as they go about their day.  Occasionally one will find a promising flower-patch and will convey news of the bounty back to the hive by pheromone and even through coded dance.

And so I arrived home, finding my family freshly returned from a wine-tasting expedition in the hills behind us.  My day’s meetings had gone well; the Pinot Noir they brought home is truly excellent.  The brain in the cloud observes my copacetic pulse-rate, the relaxed sway of my motions, the contemplative tap-tap of my keyboard.

What is my coded dance?

This essay was originally posted on Patricia Seybold's customers.com site.

How to work around the latest Man-In-The-Middle attacks

The ImperialViolet blog has an informative analysis of the just-patched encryption issue that can potentially expose unpatched iOS devices to a man-in-the-middle eavesdropping situation in some circumstances.  Seems Mac users running OS X 10.9 Mavericks should anticipate an update in the next days too…

Do this now: Update your iOS device straightaway, and your Mac when an update comes.  It couldn't be easier: in iOS, go to Settings, click General, and then Software Update.  You'll need to be on WiFi.  The whole process takes 5-7 minutes and temporarily requires a shade over 1GB of free space on your device for scratch storage.

The vulnerability was in an open-source component of iOS (and OS X, and potentially other platforms).  My point is not to make snide assertions about open source— I agree that many eyes make for a more secure product, and the solidity of Linux attests to that.  But it's no panacea, as mistakes can still be made and persist, as this demonstrates ...as does the 14-month-old WebView Android vulnerability that made the news in the past few days.  In this newest case the flaw is very easy to see even if, like me, you’re no expert in C-like languages or encryption.  But somehow it got overlooked, including by the compilers that one would have hoped would have caught such a visible issue.

From what I’ve read, seems the code involved is a fork of the OpenSSL encryption module.  I’ve not yet seen an analysis of whether it may have propagated beyond iOS/OS X.  You can bet that many eyes are looking into that right now.

As I understand it: in this vulnerability, a man-in-the-middle attacker possessing an encryption certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority could potentially intercept an encryption handshake between a user and a secure service or website, and under some circumstances the mechanisms that would detect such an attack would be short-circuited, allowing the MITM to eavesdrop or maybe impersonate the remote party.

A Workaround

Patch or no patch, one way around vulnerabilities of this sort is to tunnel past the attacker using a virtual private network that authenticates by some unrelated mechanism.  Typically, once a VPN client is set up on your computer, tablet or phone, you can connect to it most any time, and it establishes an encrypted tunnel and routes some or all your traffic into that tunnel so nearby eavesdroppers can’t make sense of it.

Using a VPN routinely is not a bad idea for those, like me, who frequently rely on public hotspots in hotels, planes and other venues… including in untrustworthy countries.  A bonus is that a VPN also evades firewall blocks for things like Voice-over-Internet and (in some countries) social media.  Of course, one must have their eyes open about the local rules for utilizing such services… It’s one thing if your hotel blocks VoIP to maximize its in-room-phone revenues, but VoIP is flat illegal in many Middle East countries (for example).  Fortunately, if you’re on a VPN, no one between you and your VPN service can detect what you’re doing, at least not easily.

Also, when you’re connected via a VPN, it appears to the services you connect-to that you are connecting from the geographic location of your VPN’s endpoint.  That’s great for accessing your subscriptions to things like Netflix and Hulu when you’re traveling beyond copyright enforcement borders.

Commercial VPN services are plentiful, cheap and easy to use.  It’s also easy to set up your own: Here at Jordan Manor we have three: two (PPTP and ssh-forwarding) running on Linux on a little Raspberry Pi per the instructions at http://unvexed.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-set-up-real-encrypted-vpn.html and http://unvexed.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-raspberry-pi-as-secure-web.html and then a third kind (L2TP) running on an elderly Mac enjoying a second life running OS X Server.

Although some firewall situations block VPNs as well, having a choice of VPNs maximizes the chance one will get through.  And running your own VPN means blocking strategies based on the IP addresses of known commercial VPN services won’t work.  Corollary: if you successfully run your own VPN in a situation where commercial VPNs are routinely blocked, don’t blab about it, and resist the temptation to run “check my IP address” utilities on the web when using your VPN, as these can serve as honeypots that database the IP addresses of likely VPN services, which can result in their being blacklisted.

(Meanwhile, blocking strategies based on the port numbers commonly used by VPN services can sometimes be evaded by routing your VPN through non-standard ports ordinarily utilized for other services less likely to be blocked, though that’s often not possible since port assignments are often baked in the pudding of most operating systems and clients.  Of the three VPN implementations I run here, only the ssh-forwarding approach is amenable to that dodge.)

The takeaway

Just be careful out there, use duplicative layers of security when you can, pay attention to updates and patches for your OS and applications and especially for things that execute code on your machine, like Java and Flash.

Something to watch

One thing worth listening-for in the coming days is the potential impact of this bug on other platforms that might utilize the same open-source code …including the Tor network, as it is OpenSSL based.

Five essential tools for maximizing your digital privacy

I don't quote my own blog posts very often, but a recent article in Slate, "Facebook wants to know why you didn’t publish that status update you started writing," spotlights an issue that caught my attention in the earliest hours of the Snowden revelations.  It's prompted some discussions and then some advice that's worth a post of its own, so here goes.

Some of Snowden's first bombshells included disclosures that US and allied intel agents could monitor users' logins and other activity on the Internet in real time even for encrypted services.  In the aftermath of these leaks, I commented,

The "As-You-Type" claim is a special concern
Webmail services help prevent loss of your work in the event of a disconnect or crash by frequently storing your draft on their server as you compose it.  This blog post, for example, has been saved to Blogger's server automatically many dozens of times as I've worked on it.  Had I typed something incendiary and intemperate about some politician or bureaucrat, that would have been stored as well-- and potentially monitored and inspected if my phrasing (or integrated profile) contained certain keywords or triggers.  This means cloud-based services of a wide variety have the capability of capturing and potentially monitoring your evolving thoughts and phrasing, even if you think better of them before committing the "Send" or "Publish" button.  So, it's bad enough that what you email and say is monitor-able... what you think is also.

So the automatic server-saving of your drafts not only provides crash-proofness but  allows the service you’re using (and any eavesdroppers, hm?) to observe your thought processes and note any evanescent notions that you may have reconsidered and deleted.  Creepy much?

Five essential tools for maximizing privacy

In response to that article, a correspondent asks if his privacy is more assured if he does his drafting in a word-processor on his computer instead.

Well, as should be clear by now, if your drafts are on some server somewhere, they can in theory be accessed and reviewed by corporate or governmental authorities.  It's happened: just ask David Petraeus.  So you might expect that if your drafting and deletions are entirely constrained to files on your local disk then they would remain private.  Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that in today's connected world.

Basically: your drafts are private if they're on your computer and not benefiting from any sort of cloud storage or backup service, and assuming no entity has installed a key logger or other monitoring tool on your computer, and that no one physically or remotely accesses your machine while your drafts are on it in some accessible form ...which might not be at all obvious.

That last point is an interesting one.  I've lost the citation but recall how some guy was convicted for some terror-related crime in the past couple years based in part on evidence collected from scratch files scattered on his disk by his word processor.  Finding this evidence was possible because he had not encrypted his hard disk, allowing easy forensic analysis of his activities.  The only defense against this sort of forensic analysis (whether by government or other entity) is to encrypt your disk with a strong password; in the US at least there are legal obstacles to forcing you to give your password up even if accused of a crime.  (Biometric authentication is not constitutionally protected.  So if Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination are important in your situation, know that anything protected by something like a fingerprint sensor can be opened by the authorities if you're accused of a crime.)

So there are nuances to what one might expect to be a simple answer.  Meanwhile, the only real news in the Slate article referenced above is that stuff you delete from a hosted draft may still have been noted and logged.  And frankly, that shouldn't be news to alert readers by now.

The first essential tool: personal encryption

Let's face it, cloud services are popular because they're useful.  For example, I routinely do my work in files stored in my Dropbox folder.  The benefit to me is that I can access them from anywhere using any of my devices or even a browser on someone else's machine.  This has been very beneficial to me, plus Dropbox keeps versioned backups of my files, so if I whoops something it's easy to return to a previous version.  Dropbox is a wonderful, reliable, non-creepy, secure service I recommend highly and for which I have documented ways to virtually assure the privacy of your files.  (Newer, self-hosted services like OwnCloud or Bittorrent Sync provide capability similar to Dropbox's without third-party involvement, leaving only the transport channel and physical or remote access to one's machines as potential vulnerabilities.)

Of course, were I writing some sort of radical manifesto, keeping my drafts in my Dropbox might not be the best approach for staying under the radar.  Snowden's whistleblowing tells us that agencies of governments friendly and otherwise (and, who knows, some well-resourced corporations or other entities) now regard ordinary encryption as opaque as Saran Wrap.  Though I'm not in the habit of writing manifestos or possessing other dodgy files, there are some aspects of my finances and work where confidentiality is important, and in those situations I perform my own duplicative private encryption, which is less likely to be easily cracked.

So, the first tools to acquire and learn to use are personal encryption utilities.  For those lucky enough to be using a Mac, OS X's built-in ability to create bandwidth-friendly encrypted sparsebundle disk images is a boon.  A helpful reader points out EncFS as another effective, cross-platform tool for bandwidth-conserving file encryption.  For any platform, TrueCrypt provides good capabilities for encrypting files and creating encrypted disk images, although it lacks the sparsebundle capability that's so beneficial for online storage situations.

For me, the benefits of using online services the way I use them outweighs the risks, which I've reduced and mitigated through tools such as these.  Similarly, I use gmail for some of my e-correspondence.  It's a great service.  I recognize that I, the user, am the product, and the service markets me to its customers as a digital dossier collected from my activities, connections, communications and (per the Slate article) thoughts.  Of course, anyone who writes to me c/o my gmail account gets databased, too... an example of how our personal privacy decisions have implications extending beyond the penumbra of our individuality.

The second essential tool: Whole-disk encryption, and password-enable your device

As previously related, I once caught a coworker just as he started poking around on my laptop after he thought I'd left the office.  He was an odd sort of duck, and my immediate thought was that he intended to put something problematic on my machine.  It happens.  In fact, it's the sort of threat that's far more likely than NSA targeting most readers here.

And it's readily addressable: turn on your device's password capabilities, including a screen-saver password or other lock-code that activates when your machine is unattended.  This goes for your smartphone as well as your computer.

But this is just an inconvenience to a determined attacker.  Devices get lost or stolen all the time, and Evil Hotel Maids in some countries can and do access computers left in visitors' rooms to perform espionage on behalf of some state or industrial entity.  The best defense against this is a good whole-disk encryption scheme.  For example, the Mac's FileVault 2 option has been a standard feature of OS X for several generations now, and it is highly effective and efficient.  If your machine's manufacturer offers something of the sort, turn it on.  If not, read some reviews and buy a utility that will do the job.

iPhones and iPads automatically encrypt their file systems when a passcode is turned on-- brilliant.  So, do that.  Recent versions of Android offer something similar.

The third essential tool: Email encryption

Ed Snowden insisted on PGP encryption of email communications, and that's a remarkable endorsement of this free and effective technology.  Its developer, Phil Zimmermann, nearly went to prison for developing it, and then-Sen. Joe Biden made two attempts to sneak wording criminalizing personal encryption into totally unrelated legislation.  It's instructive to ponder why tools that allow individuals to maximize their own privacy have been so controversial for so long... this occurred more than a decade before 9/11.

Today, much of what we do on the Internet is encrypted in transit from your computer to at least the first node in the chain to whatever service you're using.  But that only means eavesdropping is blocked to those lacking the keys, and only while in transit, and only for that hop.  For example, Gmail is very securely handled between your browser and the Gmail servers.  Once there, your emails are stored in plain text.  Worse:

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, police only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

Meanwhile, the repeated compromises of the public Certificate Authorities suggests any encryption based on CA-managed keys may be vulnerable.

The solution is to heed Snowden's advice and manage your own email encryption for those situations when postcard-class privacy is inadequate.

Setting up PGP takes a little effort and is, unfortunately, still a bit of a geek-fest, but it's worth the effort.  Mac users have it especially easy via the marvelous GPGTools.org toolkit, which integrates brilliantly with Mac's Mail.app.  GPG4Win offers something similar for Windows users.  And all participants in a conversation must have established and exchanged their public keys.  Assuming the participants are trustworthy and careful, this ensures that private discussions remain private.

The fourth essential tool: Back up!

We tend to get worked up about the risks to our data, wealth and privacy from shadowy agencies and sinister corporations, but the greatest risk is the most unavoidable: the eventual failure of our disk drives, including SSDs.  That is a matter of when, not if.

There's only one defense, and that is to maintain current and duplicative backups.  Invest in two USB pocket drives, and back up to them in alternating fashion.  Keep them in different places.  And consider supplementing your local backup strategy with online backup services like Carbonite or my own chosen service, Backblaze.  All offer excellent transport encryption; Backblaze offers a free additional private-encryption capability which further cloaks your stuff on their servers, for a great price.

But if the service happens to back up a draft that you're working on, then there's another example of your drafting-and-deletions hypothetically being accessible to someone with the right access and tools.  But that's many levels lower in terms of exposure than writing your drafts in a gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail composition window, Facebook draft post, Google Docs draft, etc.

The most essential tool: control your own computer

So there are things you can do to improve privacy and increase the chances of flying under the radar of governmental and corporate eavesdroppers and snoops.  Short of staying offline entirely, that can include

• Carefully selecting (and minimizing) what online services you use and how you use them, 
• Choosing an operating system that is comparatively secure, 
• Employing disk, file and transport encryption to increase security, and 
• Leveraging virtualization, compartmentalization, userspace separations and utilization of separate machines.

That last recommendation is quite important.  We tend to fixate on the shadowy cloak-and-dagger players, and sure: those are sexy threats that make headlines.  But the likelihood most of us will be snared by their tentacles in any meaningful way are small compared to the potential consequences of other dumb things we do.

Top among them: using your company computer for personal purposes.

Just don't.

For starters, it's a great way to get fired.  I've known smart people whose work is legally quite sensitive yet they watch naughty videos, play online games, download warez and do other risky things on their company computers, sometimes even in their normal user accounts.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Just ask John Deutch.  (What is it about CIA Directors and their digital idiocy?)  Frankly, if I caught an employee doing that, I'd fire 'em myself just out of intolerance for dumbasses.

So, just don't.  With the cost of terminating employees growing higher every year, IT departments are increasingly tasked with monitoring employee computer usage, documenting offenses useful for knocking down exit demands and defending against termination-related lawsuits.  So keyloggers are routinely installed, screen-snaps are covertly acquired, webcams are snapshotted to capture employee behavior, networking logs are databased... do a bit of searching and you'll find many super-creepy examples out there of employers watching and observing everything their employees and contractors do at the keyboard, and of tools marketed to them for ever deeper surveillance, tools like http://talygen.com/CaptureScreenShot and http://www.oleansoft.com --there are dozens and dozens.

That is a far more present threat to most people than the NSA, or industrial espionage, or the depredations of sneaky social-networking services and ad-platform companies masquerading as cloud service providers.  Solution: Get your own damn laptop or tablet, and lock it down, and keep it in your possession as much as possible, especially when you travel.

And mind your assumptions.  If you think you're safe, you're doing it wrong.

A Dropboxless Dropbox for extra-secure file sync

Dropbox is great for sharing
files between your machines.

I've used and enthusiastically recommended Dropbox for years: as a costless "virtual thumb drive" for ferrying files between my machines, for sharing files too big to email, and even to host web content.  Great stuff.  I also make a habit of using my Dropbox folder for my current work, so every document I'm working on gets backed-up in real time, in versioned form so I can even return to a previous revision if I whoops something.  I love Dropbox.  It's just an awesome service: sign up at http://db.tt/Me4yRjt and I get a small storage bonus.  

But I have harbored no illusions about the privacy implications of storing stuff in any third-party's cloud, even before the Snowden revelations.  So one of my first blog posts centered on a Mac-centric workaround: use the Mac's magnificent ability to create bandwidth-friendly, encrypted sparsebundle disk images, storing the image in my Dropbox instead of the individual sensitive files.  There's evidently a demand for doing such things, as that post quickly racked up many thousands of hits, has remained at or near the top of Google searches regarding Dropbox security since it was published, and was featured by influential tech commentator Shawn Blanc.

Over time I've kept an eye on the Dropbox market, signing up for (but, frankly, rarely using) alternatives ranging from SugarSync to SkyDrive to SpiderOak.  All are fine services with generous free storage offerings to get you started.  SpiderOak in particular has excellent privacy engineering.  None, however, are both free and open-source (FOSS).  There's SparkleShare, which is FOSS, but it lacks a mobile client, especially for iOS (which I'd need).  Tarsnap and Unison are others, but they're not seamlessly cross-platform and lack a mobile client.  OwnCloud is FOSS but requires a central server-- great for enterprises but overkill for my sync-centric individual's usage.  

All told, I probably have more than 100GB of free storage I don't use, on top of the Dropbox storage that I do use.  

But now there's an alternative that's going to pull at least some of my usage away from Dropbox.  It's Bittorrent Sync, a peer-to-peer implementation of Dropbox-like functionality that syncs stuff between your machines and mobile devices.  It's costless but not yet open-source, though the developers have adopted a never-say-never posture towards FOSS.  

Bittorrent Sync is from the folks who make the excellent uTorrent torrent-management client, and it extends the serverless torrent concept to syncing one's files between machines.  Security seems good (though without open-sourcing, that's a statement of faith) and performance is excellent.  Free clients are offered for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and for iOS and Android.  Setup is incredibly straightforward: start with your desktop machines, pasting the automatically-generated key from one client to the other to establish encrypted syncing between them; then for your mobile devices, just scan the QR code your desktop installation will present for you, and setup is complete.  Couldn't be easier, and bonus points to the Bittorrent folks for finally finding a good use for QR codes!

Then it just works.  Put a file in a folder on one machine and it will automagically appear on all the others as long as one remains powered-up.  Just like Dropbox, only there's no third-party central server involved.  (And, no web access-- which may be a plus or a minus, depending on your intended usage).  

Sharing is achieved by providing a key code to those with whom you want to share; they plug this into their own Bittorrent Sync client.  Sharing key codes for read/write and read-only are easy to generate, as are one-time keys that expire after 24 hours.  And files are versioned!

Bittorrent Sync shares some attributes with other file-syncing services: Storage folders on your clients are not encrypted, though the transmission of files is.  Syncing across hotel and a few other public networks may be problematic depending on how they're set up (my Mac client set itself to listen on TCP port 26085, which some networks might block).  And there's the pervasive risk of potentially instilling a sense of false confidence that can contribute to oversights of fundamental security and privacy practices, such as 

• Failing to set up whole-device encryption, 
• Failing to establish a long passcode on your mobile devices, 
• Failing to physically secure your devices or lock their screen when you turn away...

As a useful tool for privacy or just plain easy-peasy syncing, color me impressed about Bittorrent Sync.  It works nicely and is as polished as you'd expect from the folks who gave us uTorrent.

UPDATE: Here's an especially informative review.

How to make secure, encrypted phone calls... for free

The ZRTP-capable
Groundwire app for iOS

Recent revelations have alleged wholesale governmental monitoring of phone conversations and emails.  Governments (plural) are reported to have real-time ability to access encrypted digital connections of all kinds, including Skype.  My own hypothesis, based on details in the the published allegations and known hacks of Certificate Authorities (on whose infrastructure the entire trust system of today's Internet is based), is that purloined Certificate Authority certificates are being utilized to allow inexpensive monitoring of communications transported over encrypted channels like SSL and TLS.  The key to privacy is to utilize encryption techniques which do not depend on the compromised Certificate Authority system.

VoIP is rarely encrypted at all, but that may be changing as dismayed citizens demand an end to suspicionless, warrantless surveillance.  Today, ostel.co (note: not .com) is a free/open-source project which implements the ZRTP communications-encryption technique which allows users to call each other securely and without cost over WiFi or other Internet connections.  Conference and video calls are also supported.  More info about ZRTP here.

Each participant must run a ZRTP-capable VoIP client on their computer or smartphone-- this is not something you can use a old-timey analog telephone with.  Clients are available for a variety of platforms including OS X, Windows, iOS and Android.  Some are even free!

Getting started making and receiving secure calls is simple: you sign up for an account at ostel.co and give yourself a user name.  You download the appropriate app onto your computer or smartphone and set it up to talk to your ostel.co account.  Your friends and associates do the same.  You then ring each other up using your respective user names, and validate a randomly-generated numeric code.  Pretty simple.

Documentation is sparse, to put it charitably, but here's how I got it working on OS X 10.8.4 Mountain Lion:

• Download Jitsi, a free/open-source client capable of, among other things, telephony using ZRTP encryption.
• Run it... or attempt to.  On later builds of OS X you may receive a message that Java 6 is required.  Well, I have Java 7 installed and enabled (it's needed for some other software I use), but this didn't seem to be acceptable to Jitsi.  With some trepidation given the security issues surrounding Java recently, I accepted the download of the older version.  There was no progress indicator, but events seemed to proceed without issue (and frankly rather quickly-- I have my doubts that Java 6 was installed at all), and eventually I was able to load and run Jitsi.  The current, recommended version of Java 7 remains intact on my system and is still my default, per the version tester at java.com.
• Now you need to set up Jitsi to use your ostel.co account.  This is totally undocumented, but what works is to open its Preference pane and add a SIP account, specifying YourUserName@ostel.co (again, note it's not .com) and inputting your ostel.co account password.  
• Done.

Set-up should be similar for other apps.  The only prerequisites would seem to be (1) the ability to work with generic SIP connections and (2) ZRTP compatibility.  (Be sure to select your desired audio input and output in the Preferences-- Jitsi had selected AirPlay as my default, rather than my Mac's speakers or headphones, causing some momentary confusion for me.)


[DELIGHTED UPDATE: seems the free Linphone iPhone app supports ZRTP!  Once you have installed the app and set up a username at ostel.co, just go to the app's settings and input your ostel.co username (minus the "@ostel.co" part), then your password, then "ostel.co" for the domain.  Then, in the Network settings, select Media Encryption and tick ZRTP.  Done!  This app even seems to support encrypted video.]

Now you can enjoy secure calls... or (let's have our eyes open about such things) allegedly secure calls.  Also keep in mind that the use of encryption technologies including email encryption and Tor (if detected) can spotlight you for special scrutiny and indefinite retention of your emails and other data, even if you are a U.S. citizen.

Audio quality in my testing has been excellent, clear and crisp and without echo.