Well, the unthinkable has happened. The most powerful and sophisticated Intelligence apparatus in the history of the Second Oldest Profession has fallen into the hands of a President-elect known for a vindictive streak a mile wide, and who is considered so unstable that ten Nuclear Launch Control Officers signed an open letter pleading with the electorate not to give him access to our nuclear arsenal.

If you didn’t think you had to worry about privacy, well, that wasn’t true before, but it’s even less true now. And please, for God’s sake, don’t give me the answer that you don’t do anything online that would look suspicious. Instead, reflect on the words of Cardinal Richelieu (yes, he was an actual historical figure), who wrote, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man in the land, I will find in them a reason to have him hanged.”

In other words, it’s time to tighten up your security. There was a time when privacy pessimists were fond of saying that privacy is dead, “get over it.”

Like hell.

Yes, we live in the most transparent age ever, but that transparency depends on who you are and who you are looking at. We don’t get to see into the halls of power, but they sure as hell can look in on us. Total privacy is not to be expected, especially if you do something to attract the attention of powerful people. But you should not make it easy for them.  Here are some precautions:

1. Change all your email and social media passwords. Make them all different, and make them difficult to guess. If you’re afraid of forgetting them, don’t use a password storage utility. That’s just a big, fat, juicy target that will sooner or later be penetrated. There is this remarkable technology that is immune to computer hacking called “pen and paper.” Buy a pocket address book and use that to keep track of your online accounts.
2. Check the privacy settings on all of your social media accounts. Set them as high as you can stand to.
3. Look into using chat and email tools that feature end-to-end encryption. For SMS messages, Signal app by Whisper Systems is recommended by Edward Snowden himself. It will also let you make encrypted phone calls to anyone else with Signal installed on their smart phone. I hope they will soon have apps available for Windows 10.”Messenger” is an app that does the same thing for Facebook chatting. However, recent versions of the Facebook app now allow you to set chat conversations as secret, and the text will self-destruct after a period of time that you can determine.
4. Encrypted email. My choice is ProtonMail, which offers free accounts. This system employs a very nice implementation of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) which, the Snowden papers revealed, the NSA has not been able to crack. In fact, it’s so good, it’s what they use to encrypt much of their own traffic.
5. Actively support organizations dedicated to protecting your privacy, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been doing this almost since the Internet started, or damn nearly.

Meanwhile, buckle up and brace for impact. It’s been less than a week since the Trumpian Horror has been visited upon us, but the signs and portents don’t look good.

Watch your back.