To all thinking up ways to "distract NSA" - keep in mind that they employ skilled magicians that know how to use crazy spells and are smarter than most of us here. Oh, and they also have several orders of magnitude more money.
By magic I obviously mean math, which is the real-world equivalent, at least for information. The kind of math that leads to reading signals -30db below noise level by handheld devices (aka. GPS). The kind of math that leads to extracting causality graph out of data collected on a single point in time. The kind of math that leads to recreating your social graph out of small bits of metadata. And those are only the things invented some time ago that now everybody knows how to do. What they can, and do, now, we don't know.
So basically any scheme to "distract NSA" should be assumed to be able only to give them some good laughter, until proven otherwise by some mathemagicians.
I find all of these attempts to "troll" or "distract" the NSA quite naive. If they truly have direct access to the backbone cables of the internet, then they must be pretty good at filtering signal from noise. Just imagine the size of email/IM traffic compared to bittorrent.
If they can extract everyone's email messages from fiber-optic cables in real-time, then they surely are smart enough to create a filter that ignores just a list of words without any actual structure, like "Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center".
What if you could generates messages with real meaning but are in fact spam? That way lot of people could maybe make a difference.
Btw not sure how/where they sniff traffic, but creating alter egos that are consistent -> also interesting concept. You goto jail because of multiple virtual personality disorder :-)
Or planting bots that are not just talking gibberish?
Or creating predefined scenario and play it over time? Just to fuck them up?
How would that help? If the NSA tracks a billion accouns, how is even a million fake ones going to make a difference? I'm pretty sure "spam" is not a new concept to them.
If they want to look up any real person, they'll still be able to find all their email/IM accounts. If you include a way for the recipient of an email to tell "fake" messages from real ones, then the NSA will be able to tell as well.
Does it take cleverness to extract everyone's email messages in real time? SMTP could not have been designed to be any more "hey world, here's all my e-mail!" than it was.
The NSA would need to know the book and the cipher. Screw using mathematical encryption. For all we know it is now compromised.
As an added bonus, use text from spam email examples. Thus, the emails you send end up in the spam mail folder of the recipient. I imagine that the NSA will have optimised their hoover algorithm to exclude email that is spam. I mean, do they really need to log all of those 'enlarge your penis in 6 weeks' emails?
According to Firefox's page info, this is from Fri 17 Oct 1997.
But yes, I remember when I studied there (2001), things like Echelon and Total Information Awareness were the current topics. It was clear to us few "paranoids" that we're (soon to be) completely "transparent".
Before this what would happen? So you type
"terrorist, bomb, drone, blah blah" in an email and send it to yourself perhaps. Does the NSA flag you and send your IP to the FBI and then you get a knock on the door. Wouldn't that reveal that they are spying and reading everything? It would probably so they might not do it. Quietly watch you from the shadows so to speak until you happen to walk into your gardening store to buy some fertilizer on day for your lawn.
Now, while it is good that we know the spying is happening, a more terrifying thing is about to go on and that is -- they can just openly come and arrest you for conspiracy to commit terrorism solely based on your online jokes for example. They know that everyone knows that they are spying so there is no need to hide their "tactics and procedures" anymore. They can come to your door and with plain unflinching face say "You sent this sentence to your friend on this day and hour as detected by NSA surveillance program, you are now under arrest ... blah blah ..."
So to recap. Without an overwhelming outrage from the masses this revelation will actually embolden them and will let them widen the scope and power of these programs.
Just attach an encrypted text of the Bill of Rights to every email. Be sure to re-encrypt every time so that they can't win back their storage by de-duping.
I love this idea. I think overwhelming their storage and decryption resources is much likelier to get results, compared to attaching "junk keywords" to introduce noise (there's no way they don't already low-pass filter for such simple "intel vandalism" already, especially as methods become standardized).
Would not a better way to do this be to take the spammer's approach? Spam has gotten to be quite good at sounding realistic. It's also normally quite naive. But instead of emailing real people, just setup a vast network of bot addresses that all mail each other in realistic ways. The content of the messages can be algorithmically generated to appear like nefarious conversations.
I'd love to see NSA and FBI members burning money and time tracking down spam bots.
> Would not a better way to do this be to take the spammer's approach
On the other hand, anti-spam has gotten very good at distinguishing wanted and unwanted content.
If Google can do a reasonable job binning email spam, we must assume the NSA can do a reasonable job ignoring even relatively sophisticated keyword spamming.
> If Google can do a reasonable job binning email spam, we must assume the NSA can do a reasonable job ignoring even relatively sophisticated keyword spamming.
Indeed; however the recent Snowden leaks have given us a replacement - we know that the NSA stores indefinitely any encrypted messages. So, simply include inline a random message. Boom, you've permanently used up that much of their space for nothing.
I was thinking a new English lect, or a form of ebonics is needed that incorporates "bad" words that set off filters. Once that becomes the vernacular it will be very difficult to figure out what's useful and what's not. To be forced to do this however is stupid. Legitimate intelligence is still reasonable. But we're so far beyond that that it has come to this.
It is easy enough in Gnus to hook it in automatically so it populated your signature line by default, not much of a distraction. The scriptability is the main point of email in Emacs.
I stopped it when I eventually realized that it was probably a little bit distracting & annoying to all my readers, not myself.
I came up with a similar idea for a Chrome and Firefox plugin that, when you searched online, it would also search on everyone else's device that was running the plug in. Other people's searches would also be run on your device.
This way, it would be hard for them to track who did the original search and the amount of traffic going to the keyword would grow immensely, making it harder to find out if the search was real.
By magic I obviously mean math, which is the real-world equivalent, at least for information. The kind of math that leads to reading signals -30db below noise level by handheld devices (aka. GPS). The kind of math that leads to extracting causality graph out of data collected on a single point in time. The kind of math that leads to recreating your social graph out of small bits of metadata. And those are only the things invented some time ago that now everybody knows how to do. What they can, and do, now, we don't know.
So basically any scheme to "distract NSA" should be assumed to be able only to give them some good laughter, until proven otherwise by some mathemagicians.