[Security Discussion] entient:
disconnect.me being used by blackphone/silentcircle lends a bit of credence to them. Take a look at the superhero team of security professionals that head silentcircle... the inventor of PGP encryption, for one..? They've a track record of consistent and clear intent to serve the light side of privacy. disconnect's NSA connection or not... lest we forget Snowden is associated with the NSA as well... was he a manchurian candidate? manufactured whistleblowing? or just a whitehat?.. a secretly abused whitehat? Who knows the argument could go both ways. All I'm saying here is that just because one has had ties to a high profile group adversarial of privacy, doesn't ensure they share the same modus operandi. I concede it doesn't ensure they don't either, but there's no credence to being an open source dev with your gear up for show on github either. Remember heartbleed? There's some sketchy origins of the pull request for the bits of code that caused it.

further reading for consideration:

desktop tools:

openvpn(be sure to check for DNS leaks, disable ipv6 stack on all non-relevant interfaces, and setup a firewall config to block outbound connections if the VPN drops.)

if you're stuck on windows, drop chrome, but consider chromium. there are builds for it compiled for winblows, and it's certainly a better secondary browser than internot exploder.

bleachbit (built on linux, but compiled to windows as well. scrub the cruft regularly, as your cache can identify you. see information about E-Tags)

privazer is another thorough crap cleaner

chocolatey, a package management system for windows (apt-get for win)

peerblock blacklist-based IP blocker

hosts-file.net blacklist-based hosts blocker (blocks ads/adware/malware/spyware faster than ABP can even attempt to begin blocking a request.)

past that... stop using windows for anything personal. set yourself up a windows gaming box if you need, but when it comes down to browsing, communications, banking, etc... all are juicy targets of the blanket observation by state, corporation, and cybermafia alike. If you've had a virus at ANY time since you've installed windows, STOP. Regardless if an AV says they caught it, you have no clue if the AV is capable of assuring you that nothing else in your system was modified to leave backdoors open. Hell, there's some speculation that M$ is in bed with the NSA and has left backdoors in the system explicitly for the purpose. Just because my audience here is likely not an enemy of the state, doesn't mean a cybermafia doesn't have full knowledge of baked-in backdoors.

If you must, at least attempt to harden your windows machine:

EMET 4.1 , produced by microsoft, is like SElinux and xprivacy for windows. install, read some howtos, configure, and forget it in the system tray.

malwarebytes antiexploit, works in tandem with EMET.

sandboxie for anything else you're handling sketchy files with.

Or... on the other hand... Linux desktop systems have come a long way, and since Windows continues to disappoint with their offerings the mass exodus to linux is growing by the day. check out distrowatch.org, find a flavor that seems fun to play with, download an iso image, burn to disk, and boot it up for an hour or two.

desktop firefox addons:

eff.org "privacy badger"

dephormation.org.uk "seceret agent"

"random agent spoofer" does much of the same if you're uncomfortable with addons outside of the offical addons 'repo'

"certificate patrol" for uber- micromanagement of SSL certficates received from servers

"refcontrol" similar to the above, but removes x-forwarded-by http header (as opposed to altering the url your browser is about to fetch)

"request policy" to micromanage what sites can sideload which content from other domains

the following can also be found on FF for android

"bluhell firewall" (regex minimalized version of an Adblock list tool, incredibly lower resource consumption)

"ABEdge" is fine if you're terribly wary of closed source projects, but bluhell has worked a charm

"cleanlinks" to auto-scrape referrer nesting off of links

chromium desktop addons :

http switchboard (open source on github, better than ABEdge, noscript, requestpolicy, self-destructing cookies, betterprivacy combined... i recently found this one and am astonished at how well it does the work it took 5 separate firefox addons to do. now if only we could get a per-request user agent rotator for chromium and i'd be almost comfortable using google's FOSS project as a regular browser...)

same developer as switchboard also built a bluhell-style adblocker called ublock (mu / micro symbol, like utorrent)

Android mods:

AFwall (hmmm glad I've blocked the kernel itself from network requests after reading through this thread...)

xprivacy

unbelovedHosts, an xposed module hosts blacklist

MOAAB Mother of all ad blockers recovery-flashable hosts file

smarter wifi manager (produced by the kismet wifi tool people, well respected FOSS devs. protects android's propensity for constantly updating a 50 yard radius around you with every wifi SSID you've ever connected to, and saves battery.)

Google Auth (2 factor authentication program that works with quite a few non-google services, basically a time based RNG keyring, probably some others out there but a nice implementation, IMHO, despite the Goo.)

openvpn / tun.ko installer ... stop telCo/firesheep deep packet inspection. VPN services all over the place, check torrentfreak for up to date reviews. Don't stick your nic in the internet without a VPN on...

stay away from minmin guard and the supposed poof an Adblock listrt of peerblock, both have publicly questioned sources and motives.

if you're really really adventurous, consider replicant, a completely GNU android distribution sponsored by Free Software Foundation. if you have a device they support, and have some hair on your geek chest, it's going to be like a cabin in northern Canada, be ready to be off the grid.

stay safe, san diego.