Thanks to The New York Times, we now know that the NSA is illegally screening virtually all Internet and email traffic going or coming to or going from the U.S. If that’s not enough, the USA PATRIOT Act requires ISPs to hand over customer information, e-mail records, browsing records, etc., without a warrant.

Not to mention the crooks on the Internet trying to break into your PC to steal your identity. One of their favorite cruising grounds are wi-fi hotspots, where they try to break into unprotected PCs.

I’ve found a practical solution to prevent both government snoops and wi-fi pirates from eavesdropping on your Internet communications. For US$485, you can own a practical, all-in-one computer privacy system. It’s called Armorware, and it consists of a USB stick with 110 megabytes of usable capacity and a CD to boot a laptop or desktop PC into a secure computing environment running under the Linux operating system. Using your Armorware USB stick, you can walk into any wi-fi equipped café anywhere in the world and create a private and completely secure connection to the Internet.

Armorware does this by creating an encrypted data channel between you and the Armorware servers in Toronto, Canada. Even if the connection is tapped, eavesdroppers see only gibberish because the entire communication between the Armorware USB stick and the Armorware servers is encrypted! They won’t even be able to see where you’re surfing or to whom you’re sending e-mail, because all communication is through Armorware’s secure servers.

Once Armorware boots up, you get a Windows-like display and a dozen or so open-source programs that allow you to import and export files in most Microsoft formats, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You also get the excellent Firefox browser, a desktop organizer and several utilities. Plus, you can run many other programs, so long as they are written for Linux.

For expats and perpetual travelers, this is a great deal. Even if your USB sticks are lost or stolen, the data can be encrypted so that the thief won’t recover anything usable. You could even back up your files to an encrypted Armorware server with unlimited capacity.

To install Armorware, all you need to do is reconfigure your PC’s BIOS settings to permit booting from a CD and change the boot sequence instructions to boot first from the CD drive. This is a one-time operation on your laptop, and lets you use Armorware anywhere in the world.

Once you’ve accomplished this, simply create a pass phrase for your open-source PGP encryption keys or import your own. Within a matter of minutes, you are ready to log on to the Armorware servers.

It’s good that Armorware’s creators chose to use PGP instead of proprietary encryption software, because it’s an open-source algorithm that can be checked out by outside computer experts. And PGP, along with the open-source Linux as an operating system, are just two examples of Armorware’s use of outstanding open-source applications.