Maybe it's time for somebody to start a company aimed at helping illegal immigrants avoid the government?
How about a self-surveillance platform to measure your footprint?
The idea is basically an automated network-level CTF. Get as much data out as possible, then report back with the results. You could do this with a group of friends (feed all your friends data into your analysis box), to yourself (and all your devices baring OS restrictions), or with a larger group of security-minded individuals.
For extra fun, if you're capturing the traffic on your own machines, you could have a tool that extracts network encryption keys from memory, which should work similarly for programs using the same encryption stack, and you then feed that into the network analysis tool.
You could then use this to make sure you're not sending out data you don't want to send out in the first place; ideally you'd get to the point where your analysis tool can decrypt every packet, so that you're sure you're not sending out any data that you don't want to get out.
PANDA looks like an interesting tool to automate the retrieval of encryption keys; it can replay full process executions using a modified version of QEMU, and find procedures that convert high entropy data (i.e. encrypted or compressed data) to lower entropy data.
Coincidentally, if you get this up and running you can also automate the breaking of (encryption-based) DRM; that's just a side effect of gaining fuller control over your general-purpose computer. Oops.
Well, it probably wasn't as well thought out as you might have hoped, but there's no question there's at least thin connection between my username and most of my positions on things.
The comment I made above was kind of just spur of the moment, off the cuff, to be honest. I have a fundamental and visceral disdain for government, and especially anything that hints at that Big Brother / Orwell-esque world of Nineteen Eighty Four. And it especially pains me to see technologists/hackers willfully taking part in supporting government oppression of free people. So of course I'm going to make an offhanded comment about how we should do the exact opposite.
And I feel a little snarky now, because people are always referring to Peter Thiel as a "libertarian" and this strikes me as extremely un-libertarian. And as a libertarian myself, I don't want Thiel misleading a lot of people about how libertarian ideals.
You could then use this to make sure you're not sending out data you don't want to send out in the first place; ideally you'd get to the point where your analysis tool can decrypt every packet, so that you're sure you're not sending out any data that you don't want to get out.
Sounds something like an inverse IDS. I know there are some tools out there now for monitoring outgoing traffic, but not sure if there's anything with that specific spin on it. You might be onto something there.
Yes. For the most part, I oppose the idea of nation-states and most of what people call "government" altogether. I support free movement of people, ideas, consumer goods, etc. As far as I'm concerned, as long as no use of coercive force / aggression is involved, it's all good.