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? -- ---------------------------- Kaos Keraunos Kybernetos ------------------- + ^ + Sunder "The real aim of current policy is to /|\ \|/ sunder@sunder.net ensure the continued effectiveness of /\|/\ <--*--> ALLOW FREE EXPORT OF US information warfare assets against \/|\/ /|\ STRONG CRYPTOGRAPHY! individuals,businesses and governments \|/ + v + PROTEST WASSENAAR!!! in Europe and elsewhere" -- Ross Anderson ------------------------------ http://www.sunder.net ---------------------- RESTRICTED DATA - This material contains RESTRICTED DATA as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Unauthorized disclosure subject to administrative and criminal sanctions. NOFORN ORCON WNINTEL SIOP-ESI CNWDI