PROTECTING YOUR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Cryptography is not the easiest technology to integrate into your life, especially if you don't care about the details. Making secure communication transparent to the user is hard. Fortunately, there are a number of tools out there that are relatively user friendly.

Signal
Signal is a secure messaging app. It is available for Android, iOS, and desktop. Usually your texts are sent and stored on your provider's servers indefinitely. Anybody can read these, either when they are in transit or snatched from the server. In contradistinction, Signal ensures that messages are encrypted from the moment they leave your device to the moment when they are received by the recipient. What's more, messages do not seem to be stored on a Signal server or in the cloud.

You can also make encrypted voice calls.

WhatsApp
Perhaps a bit more user friendly. Developed in concert with the developers of Signal, WhatsApp also provides end-to-end encryption. You can also make encrypted phone calls.

PGP
PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, has been around for a while and is a bit more complicated. That complication also makes it more versatile. There are many different pieces of software that provide PGP encryption. PGP is meant for email.

Mailvelope
Mailvelope is a PGP plugin for your browser. It works right out of the box with Gmail, GTX, Outlook.com, and Yahoo! mail. It can be tinkered with to work with other webmail providers.

Thunderbird and Enigmail 
Thunderbird is an email client. You can download it and then integrate it with Enigmail, a plugin that adds encryption into the Thunderbird interface.

Tor
Tor is a browser that uses a special method of obscuring the source of data that you send and receive. It essentially makes you anonymous by passing your data off to a bunch of different computers before it gets to the server you are requesting information from.

VPNs
Virtual Private Networks are encrypted connections between your computer and another computer somewhere in the world that makes all the data requests for you. A VPN is like a neighbor with a very short attention span that will go run errands for you. If you send him to the bookstore to get a copy of Steal This Book and the police later take notice, they will go see the neighbor...but by that time he has forgotten everything.

If you use both Tor and a VPN at the same time, you are anonymous and encrypted.

Disc Encryption
You can also encrypt your entire hardrive. OSX provides the option for native encryption and I think NTFS for Windows does as well. You can also choose from a ton of third party software.