We now live in an age where everyone is watching everyone else, and everyone is reading each other's emails, and opening each other's files. This means that you need to pay closer attention than ever before towards encryption tools, and anything designed to protect your privacy. We obsess over online privacy, especially when Eddie and Glenn decided to reveal top-secret files to the world.

We have seen how encryption tools like Bitlocker and secure zipping tools such as 7-Zip work. So here are 5 we have not already covered.

VeraCrypt

I am cheating a bit here, because VeraCrypt is a fork of the well-known but now discontinued Truecrypt. So do we count this as a new app, or a version of the old one? For the purposes of this article, I am going to go for the former.

VeraCrypt is simply brilliant. It can open TrueCrypt volumes, and it claims to have an algorithm with "enhanced security", making the volumes tougher to crack. There is also a Mac OS X and Linux version for all those not rocking a Windows machine.

Kleopatra

Kleopatra is a "Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI" which can be obtained from Git. In fact, you can obtain the source code from Git, so this option is only for those brave-of-heart who are willing to fight the good fight and help put Kleopatra together.

Or you can be like me, and treat the computer as Skynet and run away.

AES Crypt

AES Crypt is as simple as it comes. It places an option in the Windows Explorer right-click menu window, and you can then encrypt the file with a password. AES Crypt will then give you an encrypted version of the file, which can only be opened by someone knowing the password. You can then email it out, put it on Dropbox for someone to download, and so on.

This means AES Crypt does not delete the original file. So if it has to be deleted, don't forget about it. And don't forget the password to your encrypted file either. Otherwise you're really in trouble.

MiniLock

MiniLock goes a little bit further than AES Crypt in that it requires more than a password. You need your email and secret passphrase to generate a MiniLock ID. Then when someone wants to send you a file, they can use your MiniLock ID to encrypt it. If you want to encrypt and send something, you must have their MiniLock ID.

MiniLock also has a Chrome browser extension for creating files on the fly.

DMCrypt

DMCrypt is a Linux-only disk encryption program, so this is one I am not overly familiar with (my experience with Linux lasted a whopping 10 minutes). But it seems like a solid program, and therefore worth mentioning on Cool Websites & Apps.

In my mind, DMCrypt is a lot like Truecrypt/Veracrypt. You make an encrypted folder to store your sensitive files and you access it by mounting the folder as a partition. Here is an excellent guide to setting up an encrypted folder with DMCrypt.

Which encryption program do you use to point the finger at the NSA and GCHQ?