On Sun, 18 Oct 2009, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communicationto house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
The (in)effectiveness of "chaff" has been discussed at length in the Tor community, and while it might not be useful to confuse end-to-end traffic analysis, what effects would it have on a correlation database like this ? I'll bet good "chaff" (probably not as easy to generate as you might think) has a far higher than 1:10 ratio of expense to generate vs. expense to "process". A windows virus that generates false transactional information, web trails, and death threats against the congressional seating chart ?