This article will self-destruct in...

Our data is already vulnerable to hackers and may soon be under government surveillance, too. So how do the web-savvy keep themselves to themselves?

Young hackers working to protect the UK from cyber crime. If the bill is passed, Service Providers will legally have to retain browsing histories for 12 month (Rex)

If the Investigatory Powers Bill currently being pushed through Parliament becomes law, it’s open season on your data. Telephones, computers and browsing histories will all become fair game. On its first reading, a Tory MP attempted to reassure the nation by inadvertently quoting Joseph Goebbels: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." But here’s a scary thought: what if the people running our so-called intelligence agencies simply aren’t that bright?

You may recall the recent case of Mohammed Umar Farooq, who was hauled in under the Government’s controversial anti-extremism strategy, Prevent, after being spotted reading a book in his university library entitled Terrorism Studies. (Farooq was, it should go without saying, a student of counter-terrorism.) Now if peaceful, law-abiding citizens can’t protect themselves from the ineptitude of those who watch over us, what should we make of this bill? Well, Shami Chakrabarti, ex-director of human rights advocacy group Liberty, has called it “a breath-taking attack on the internet [and telephone] security of every man, woman and child in our country”. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that it can be deflected.

For example, one of the most far-reaching powers being proposed by the bill is also the easiest to scotch. If the bill passes into law, Internet Service Providers will be legally obliged to retain customers’ browsing histories for 12 months and, without even needing a warrant, police will have the ability to snoop through them. It’s like giving them a license to hack. But when you consider how competent the communications companies are – in the recent TalkTalk hack, 157,000 accounts were breached and their financial information accessed – you may not be too happy about that. (Even Chancellor George Osborne has reservations: “At the heart of cyber security is a painful asymmetry between attack and defence. It is easier and cheaper to attack a network than it is to defend it.”) But luckily, there’s an app that can help.

Tor – or “the onion router”, so-called, presumably, because it makes hackers cry when they try to penetrate it – is a volunteer-run network that facilitates anonymous browsing by distributing its users’ transactions across the internet via a series of random encrypted connections. “The idea,” they explain, “is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you – and then periodically erasing your footprints.”

Its privacy-protecting properties have been praised by everyone from Edward Snowden to Professor Omand, a former director of GCHQ, and it comes in idiot-proof browser form. It’s also open source, which means that legions of nerds are constantly improving the code and scanning it for potential weaknesses. You can see their work at torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

But how about your phone? In theory, the new bill will place judicial checks on the powers of the security services to intercept communications such as telephone calls and text messages, ideally limiting their use to cases of serious crime and extremism. In the past, however, the establishment’s definition of extremism has been dangerously broad. Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, for instance, has recently been deployed against activists traveling to help refugees in Calais, and was most famously used in 2013 to detain David Miranda, the husband of security journalist Glenn Greenwald, and question him for nine hours at Heathrow.

That year, only 0.03 per cent of the people stopped under Schedule 7 were actually arrested. But David Cameron hasn’t modified his position: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone…this Government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.”

But not on Jitsi – its name, inexplicably, being an Anglicisation of the Bulgarian word for “wires”. Found at jitsi.org/, this is an open-source, automatically encrypted alternative to Microsoft’s popular video chat application Skype – which according to documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013, contains a “back-door” that gives intelligence agencies easy access to the millions of private voice and video conversations hosted there every day.

Similarly, Signal – a piece of kit released by San Francisco-based software developers Open Whisper Systems, which is free, easy to install on your iPhone or Android – offers phone calls, text, picture and video messages that are protected by end-to-end encryption. What’s more, it uses the internet to circumnavigate the telephone companies, which keeps bills down. As the developers boast: “Say Anything…Pay Nothing.” whispersystems.org/

It’s a phrase to spoil a snooper’s day. As is seemingly inoffensive “Pretty Good Privacy” encryption. PGP is slightly less user-friendly than the options above; but it is, as far an anyone can tell, unbreakable – at least until the intelligence services figure out how to build a quantum computer. Until that day – one that some refer to fearfully as the “cryptocalypse” – PGP remains the best way to keep your emails away from prying eyes.

PGP is a form of public-key cryptography so powerful that, after American computer scientist Phil Zimmermann invented it in 1991, it sparked a three-year criminal investigation for possible violation of the Arms Export Control Act. Depending on your operating system there are several options for implementing, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a simple, step-by-step guide at ssd.eff.org/en

But hey – if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.