"SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (li terally!)"

[Cathal Garvey]

There's now precedent to suggest that providing FISA-ordered data in a
deliberately inconvenient format can be considered contempt of court.
The case establishing it? Lavabit printing out their server TLS keys in
small font. That's not even such a big deal, because OCR could still be
used trivially if the opponents weren't tech-illiterate. Depending on
the type of key, you could probably even detect OCR errors quickly by
checking for primality or group-compatibility for the key subunits.

So that's even less technically troublesome than what you're suggesting,
and it was contempt. I don't think the telecoms would get away with it,
even if they did care a damn about customers.

On 14/05/14 06:11, jim bell wrote:
> Alright, what I meant was this:  The judge ordered that the information be provided in electronically-readable form.  He meant, "not on paper", because if it were on paper, that would be very difficult to actually USE.  My idea was to put the information onto pdf files, where if you view the pdf file, it would look like lines of "captcha"-type data:  Weird, warped characters, in various odd colors, overlapping lines, etc.   CAPTCHA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia    Specifically designed to NOT be computer-identifiable.  The essence of the presentation of the data would be that it wouldn't be readable by 'computer' at all; it would have to be decoded by human intervention...even though it was in "electronically-readable form"!!
>                
>  
>    CAPTCHA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> A CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-respons...  
> View on en.wikipedia.org Preview by Yahoo  
>         Jim Bell
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
>  From: John Young <jya at pipeline.com>
> To: jim bell <jamesdbell9 at yahoo.com>; cpunks <cypherpunks at cpunks.org> 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 5:51 PM
> Subject: Re:  "SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (li terally!)"
>  
> 
> 
> There is a good chance the documents are covertly marked as
> you suggest, the ostentatious classification markings a ruse for
> untutored yokels to fancy are genuine. 
> 
> Covert markings have been in use for a long time, as well as 
> ostentatious markings. On paper as well as digital and other
> forms of electronic.
> 
> And certainly packets carry unique markings in a variety of
> overt and covert types.
> 
> Some of the techniques fall under the inadvertent emanations 
> rubric associated with Tempest -- which has blossomed well 
> beyond the FOIA releases from the late 1990s. TSCM is a 
> marvel of duplicity and ruse.
> 
> At 08:16 PM 5/13/2014, you wrote:
> 
> From: Black
> Fox <fox at vbfox.net>
>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 2:58 PM, coderman
> <coderman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:00 AM, John Young
> <jya at pipeline.com>
> wrote:
>>>>> We've seen the Greenwald book No Place to Hide, where are
> the
>>>>> promised gush of Snowden documents available? His
> publisher
>>>>> doesn't show a source. Surely not another marketing
> tease.
>>>> great question; let us know if you find them!
>>> http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf 
>>
>> If I were the telephone company from which the records were requested,
> I'd note that the records were requested in "electronic"
> format.  Then, I'd ask a programmer to write a program to write a
> program to generate pdf files with embedded "captcha"-type
> text:  Images that are quite apparent to the human eye, but are very
> difficult for any computer to make any sense of.   All the
> phone records would be there (in no particular order), and they'd all be
> very readable to humans, but...
>>               
> Jim Bell
>>
>>

-- 
T: @onetruecathal, @IndieBBDNA
P: +353876363185
W: http://indiebiotech.com
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