Tech Savvy in a Perilous Age

I’ve been reading up on some tech issues involving security, website issues, and a host of other things. I’ve found some great things.

While its always been a nagging feeling that I should do more for security, famed whistleblower Edward Snowden recently said that professionals, and he mentioned priests, should do more for the security of their Parishioners.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

“What last year’s revelations showed us was irrefutable evidence that unencrypted communications on the internet are no longer safe. Any communications should be encrypted by default,” he said.

And:

He added: “If we confess something to our priest inside a church that would be private, but is it any different if we send our pastor a private email confessing a crisis that we have in our life?”

This led me to consider our Parish resources. I’ve learned a lot from The Lawyerist, regarding paperless offices, redundant backups, cloud storage, and encryption at rest. That led to a simple investment in Crashplan.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress here. Stay tuned.

UPDATE – After my hours of research, I asked a Parishioner this weekend what he did for a living… IT director working with security for NASA. If only I’d’a known!

The Rev. Kenneth Allen