Banford: Who's in Big Brother's Database?

[John Case]

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 ?