WARNING: This does NOT make you safe from being spied on. There are no silver bullets and anyone who says there are is either lying or just plain stupid. Security relies on multiple methods, tools, and behaviors. Security is not a destination its' a journey. Keep in mind that security is an arms race between activists and those who would suppress us. That being said;
This post assumes you know a bit about Linux and have a mostly up to date system. For this post I am going to be using a VirtualBox VM running Debian 9. The reason I recommend this is that a VM is not tied to any PC. You can export the VM to a USB drive and take it with you. You can later install the VM onto any PC running VirtualBox. You can hide your work and recover it later, just don't lose the USB drive.
For this discussion I am using a Debian based Linux like Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint. These methods work just as well on RPM based systems like RedHat or CentOS.
Step 1. Update your system. This is always a good step when adding a new package or doing any thing than a minor configuration change.
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
Step 2. Install the software. There are several pieces of software that need to be installed;
- haveged - This provides a stream of random data which makes the creation of a pgp key go much faster and more secure.
- ntp
- git
- wget
- curl
- postfix
- gpg
- thunderbird
- tor
- VPN client
