Just a few years ago, the major security concern confronting most distributors was that hackers might disseminate viruses or break into their computers to cause mischief. Today, that fear seems almost quaint by comparison, when everyone from terrorists to the U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly eager to gain access to your data.

On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act (HR 3162), which authorizes law enforcement agencies to secretly gather information about individuals – everything from their library book withdrawals, medical records and bank statements to their college transcripts, church memberships and hard drive contents. The most unsettling aspect of the law is that the government can use these tools to carry out fishing expeditions against U.S. citizens who have been neither charged with nor suspected of committing, or planning to commit, a crime.

In response to these heightened security issues, privacy-oriented software is becoming the "killer app" of the 21st century. Experts agree that the first line of defense against computer snooping should be the installation of a Firewall, a system that blocks access to a network of computers, or individual computers, by another network.

The second step should be to protect a browser's "cookies," history file and browser cache. While these can be manually deleted through a Web browser's "Tools" menu, software can automate this process for you and erase the cache, cookies, history, visited URLs, typed URLs, auto-complete forms data, "index.dat" files, swap files and temp folders.

Simply deleting programs from your hard drive is not enough. When files are deleted, only the file name is removed from the file allocation table, while the file remains intact until the space it occupies on the drive is replaced by another file. However, there are many programs available that remove all traces of files and folders from your hard drive.

They accomplish this by overwriting the space occupied by the deleted file with random numbers. The more sophisticated ones use a procedure that conforms to a Department of Defense specification.

Increasingly, companies are attempting to safeguard the privacy of their online communications by turning to various encryption programs for their e-mail and "chat" sessions. Many of these use the unbreakable 256-bit Advanced Encryption System algorithms.

The truly wary can surf the Internet with almost total freedom by using public proxy servers to hide their real Internet Protocol address. Anonymous proxy servers located throughout the world hide your identity and geographical location.

Similarly, anonymous re-mailers allow the posting of messages to newsgroups or to individuals, while the sender remains unidentifiable. The re-mailer removes your name and address from the header of the mail message and forwards it to its next destination. As with anonymous proxy servers, anonymous re-mailers can be "chained" so that a message passes through several re-mailers, making tracing or monitoring all but impossible.

Those considering the use of privacy protection software can start by downloading and "test driving" a program from one of the many shareware/software/freeware sites such as ZDNet (www.zdnet.com) or Web Attack.com (www.webattack.com).

But you don't need to hide your identity to send your suggestions and comments to: harper.d@att.net.