The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.

The FSF's campaigns manager Libby Reinish said the email self-defence guide would help everyone, including beginners, to make the NSA's job of snooping on ordinary people's communications a little harder.

"We're releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex," she wrote in a post on the FSF website.

"Gmail, for example, mines your email to serve you ads. If that email is encrypted on your desktop, Google's servers will never see the contents of your messages (even if you don't use Gmail yourself, every email you send to someone who does ends up on their servers)."

Her post linked to a detailed infographic about encryption; a guide to setting up the GNU Privacy Guard to encrypt email on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSX is also provided. The post additionally provided a link to a list of free software that could be used to preserve one's privacy.