Net News as Cover Traffic

[Ray Dillinger]

I think that what we really need is some kind of NNTP-like system 
that distributes encrypted packets instead of cleartext ones.  If 
you want to baffle traffic analysis, just create a system where 
they can't tell the difference between your emails and tons and 
tons of news traffic.  

It's not like you could really escape regulation here; if 
people can't read it, it isn't news.  But you could provide 
a bunch of encrypted traffic on the same port as any encrypted-
mail distribution or encrypted-web system (a la freedom) during 
the news distribution - and you could read news without any 
news hosts anywhere knowing which news you were reading.

Hell, you could even gateway some usenet groups through it if you 
wanted to give it a kick-start.  And you could have your own groups 
available only on the crypto grapevine.  They would serve as message 
mixes, in some cases.  

You wouldn't want to follow the classic hierarchical distribution 
model that usenet uses; that makes any differently-routed traffic 
stand out.  But NNTP is actually pretty flexible about how messages 
get passed, and could be deployed in a fractal way as easily as a 
hierarchical way, at the cost of distribution being a bit slower. 
With straight NNTP, the overhead of organizational messages would 
be raised; but it could be made more efficient again using hashes 
on multiple messages so that different hosts could quickly check 
for identical lists of posts and quickly discover  any that were 
missing in either direction. 

				Bear