Response 2- JimB

One thing that I might be interested in doing for a project is to see if I can create my own VPN Server(VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, for those who aren’t familiar). I remember being really aggravated back in 2013 when I, along with many other Americans, learned about how the NSA was spying on American citizens when Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents with that information in them. I know that the government does it to try and prevent terrorism and all, but it just seems to me like spying on everyone like this just takes away a big part of their freedom. Their freedom of privacy.

Over the period of time since finding this out, I’ve heard about something known as a VPN, which I’ve been really interested in. They redirect all of your device traffic through an encrypted tunnel so that way anyone trying to look at your device traffic won’t be able to see it. Since it is technically legal for the government to keep track of things like this, the way I see it, using/creating a VPN is a kind of hacking since it makes it impossible for anyone to see your encrypted traffic. One big problem though is that a lot of VPN’s that are available to download is that with a lot of them you would have to pay to download it.

My way around this is the DIY method by making my own VPN server and also to go with the Share What Was Inaccessible method that was also touched upon in the New Media Strategies reading by making the code I used to set it up free for anyone to download so that way anyone can create a VPN server of their own.