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Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

Well then let's make them store the entire internet. It's about time that we encrypted everything. Flood the communication channels with encrypted chatter and let's see how long they can keep storing it all. If you really want to fuck with them intersperse your encrypted data with random bits from /dev/random. Even better, just steam random bits non-stop and every so often intersperse it with just a tiny bit of your real data.

The NSA knows how fucked they'd really be if everyone used end to end encryption. You can smell their fear.

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You probably want to use urandom instead of random. /dev/random will block if the entropy pool runs out whereas /dev/urandom will not.

On Linux, yes. Not on the BSDs.

I agree in principle. There might be some blow-back with regard to metadata that they can now legally (under their definition) track.

Let's do the math to see if that would even be possible:

    * 144 billion emails per day in the U.S.
    * Average email size is 75 kb.
    * Works out to about 10 petabytes/day.

That facility they're building in Utah is exascale, so the computational burden isn't that much if they're simply looking at metadata. Obviously, decryption is more complicated.

Last I checked, a MW/year runs about $1m with long term agreements (old number; probably $2m now). Assuming a budget on the order of billions, that isn't a huge hurdle for a government snoop to clear.

> Well then let's make them store the entire internet.

The Utah facility is supposed to be able to store the next 100 years of all Internet data + traffic, even at the current projected rate of growth.

Actually I'm sure the NSA is perfectly A-OK with techies, rather than getting involved politically and using their knowledge to mobilize the non-tech-savvy, instead expending their limited energy and time on weird slacktivism antics.

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