Tidbits has a great article by Glenn Fleishman entitled "Road Warrior Scramble" that outlines the protections used by Glenn while attending the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) digital media conference:

What I didn’t do is expose my passwords, my browsing habits, my email, or my FTP transfers to anyone who might have been watching my traffic. I used a variety of encryption methods to make sure that nothing I did was easily snoopable, because all of the networks I used were public.