Use encryption on ALL data that you don't want to publicly readable.
I post something that says this pretty much weekly on here and I'm sure I could post it every day if I had the time. Stop trusting third parties to keep your data back; they lose it all the time, through subpoenas, leaks, accidents, exploits, whatever. Take responsibility for yourself. If you have comms that can't safely be aired on CNN, ENCRYPT THEM. There's simply nothing else to say on the matter. Don't trust anyone else to protect you, because they aren't able to even if they try. You must use real, client-side cryptography to keep your message even semi-secure.
While I most certainly agree, this begs the question: what encryption tools can you use (and trust)? I'm pretty confident that there are backdoors in most commercial tools from Apple, Microsoft and PGP (just to name a few). Before anyone is too quick on say that TrueCrypt is the answer, please note that there have been wild speculations about backdoors etc in TrueCrypt too (but I don't think anything has been proven).
Truecrypt is OSS and has some insanely brilliant people working on it. I think that more than a couple people would notice if there were shenanigans afoot.
Hmm. Interesting statement since the authors have chosen to remain anonymous. You would think it would be impossible to know weather or not they are brilliant, or if they are working for the US security agencies.
So you have people working on the most well known full disk encryption system on planet Earth, but they are living in obscurity.... kind of interesting isnt it?
I post something that says this pretty much weekly on here and I'm sure I could post it every day if I had the time. Stop trusting third parties to keep your data back; they lose it all the time, through subpoenas, leaks, accidents, exploits, whatever. Take responsibility for yourself. If you have comms that can't safely be aired on CNN, ENCRYPT THEM. There's simply nothing else to say on the matter. Don't trust anyone else to protect you, because they aren't able to even if they try. You must use real, client-side cryptography to keep your message even semi-secure.