Use Tor, Get Targeted By the NSA

Given that now we are all suspects in waiting, use of anything to protect privacy is going to be evidence of, well... something. Governments, for some weirdo reason, think that no one should have need for privacy, if they are decent lawful people. Despite individuals in government insisting on personal privacy for them selves.

What bothers me is that the more we use systems to protect our selves, the more governments will become paranoid because they may not be able to monitor us to reassure them selves that we are not up to no good. This could well make them react by telling the mass population that "terrorists" and "criminals", might as well bung "pedophiles" in there too, are communicating "securely". We will prove their paranoia, give them the evidence they can twist and use. It will become more and more twisted, with the whole thing artificially ratcheting up. This seems to be how governments do things these days.

However, perhaps the severe danger government face is that privacy may catch on. Imagine if people begin to default to the most secure methods they can get. Simple add-ons that enforce using HTTPS where available, browsers that block tracking, more secure email, and so on. Might not be robust and perfect, but the internet would see more and more traffic definable as "secure". As this goes on, these secure services will become faster, easier, and more secure, enabling more and more people to be easily secure. Worse still, the software would become independent and open sourced for verification. In the end, even the NSA should have difficulty keeping up and cracking the security. The more data that is encrypted, the more data they will feel they have to keep.

Dunno quite where I am going with this, but I reckon that by aggressively spying on mass population government is making their own job much harder in the long run. It could force the internet and communications in general to become secure beyond their capabilities to crack. Then all that is left is blackmailing people to give up keys with threats of prison, or worse.

Cipher punks used to urge everyone to run encryption software as often as possible. This was to make sure that privacy and anonymity because the default, and that people wanting to breach that privacy had to justify it. Those people couldn't just say "only the bad guys try to hide what they're doing".

It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a lawyer present. On TV it's only the bad guys who lawyer up.

So it seems that NSA analysts are guided to assume you're not a US citizen—and act like corresponding privacy laws don't apply—when you mask your location in an attempt to preserve anonymity online.

This is where saturation flooding of meaningless garbage can play a role in anonymization. In addition to making timing attacks more difficult, bulk garbage data provides a cheap smokescreen for the anonymized traffic and participants, increasing the burden for storage and analysis.

I'm pretty sure even the NSA would have a hard time storing and sorting through the collective output of everyone's /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

It's also a very low-risk thing to do - less so than even routing. If routing, one can just top up a channel with garbage to whatever rate both sides agree upon. It needn't affect speeds for others.

Is this some kind of campaign to scare off people using privacy protection techniques? What's next, to force people to use credit cards instead of cash so that their spending habits could be easier to track?

"In light of the recent leaks about the NSA's illegal spying, I've decided to go back to using M-x spook output in my email signatures."

http://lwn.net/Articles/554941/

That is what we all should do. Imagine when lot of internet users globally used Tor and encrypted all their messages. Just because. NSA would go nuts trying to target them all.

Come, use Tor and join the fun then. If we all do we will all be labeled terrorists, which is so trendy these days.

And lets get all cool EFF stickers for our laptops!

https://supporters.eff.org/shop