Re: Throwing Sand into the All-Seeing Eye (further ideas)

[Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>]

Jay Holovacs wrote:
> 
> At 08:25 AM 12/15/98 -0600, mib wrote:
> >
> >On Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 04:02:00AM -0800, Mixmaster wrote:
> >> There used to be a web site called "Throwing Sand into the All-Seeing Eye"
> >> which listed a long list of possible NSA-snooper keywords, such as
> military
> >> classifications and code words that could be sent for fun across the
> >> Internet for sole purpose of being flagged by the NSA.
> >
> 
> Here are some more suggestions (I didn't make this list; all of these
> supposedly were on watch actual lists of different types----"thanks" to the
> police & spook organizations for doing the research)
 

One of the things to consider in order to be successful in this at any level is
that we need to automate some of the features of including such keywords in
emails.  I'm sure the NSA has lovely filtering capabilities in Echelon to
remove the chaff emails.  (Think of the way spam gets filtered based on
keywords.)

Certainly if we use the same tag in every email, they can filter us out by the
email address.  This does have a nice unexpected side effect: being labeled a
kook makes for the NSA not wanting to watch your posts, and then you would have
a bit more privacy, however, don't count on this: far more likely is that they
do archive everything and then use a smart search engine.

We could rotate the tags around, but if we send too many of these, they can
throw you into the above category.

You could post them anonymously, which makes it much harder for them catalog,
so they will be forced to look at the traffic, when and if, they need to search
it.

You could have some program randomly alter your email address, but patterns
would be found to filter you out that way.

We could also use remailers to create lots of cover traffic going to
/dev/null.  This would be far more interesting, especially if we add some sort
of poetry writer that spits out spook talk and update it occasionally with
current event keywords.  Then again, they could filter the messages that go to
/dev/null, or find patterns in the spook poetry generators...  

We are of course talking about doing something as evil as spamming in that it
does generate lots of traffic and eats up lots of bandwidth.  This has the side
effect of wasting lots of our resources and little of the NSA's.  There is the
obvious problem of how many people are willing to do such a thing.  If say, ten
or twenty of us start running such spookbots, it will eat lots of our
resources, but few of theirs.  If lots and lots of us run spookbots, it might
create a small dent in Echelon which they'll simply address by adding more
hardware.  (Keep in mind that the figure of their yearly budget is several
billion, for which you pay for in the form of taxes.  Comparatively to one
person, they have what approaches infinitely greater funds.  Comparatively to
the entire country, they don't, but the entire country won't join such an
effort.)

Unless there is a large scale effort, we'd be doing nothing more than the
WASSENAAR protest.  Sure, some would say, we'd be calling undue attention to
ourselves, but if you're on this list, or receiving it, you're already calling
undue attention to yourself.  If Echelon is indeed as large as it is reported
to be, the mere reading of Cypherpunks is enough to flag you.

Anyway, anyone have any ideas to further build on this?



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