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Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

I have a small conspiracy theory going, that they are using this sort of articles to discourage people from using encryption.

I suggest that we all create a handful of large files from /dev/random, make torrents out of them, and seed them until their servers bleed out.

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I think they're both serious about what they're doing (being able to keep encrypted data indefinitely), and they're using these public disclosures to discourage mass adoption of encryption. As everybody here understands, the NSA very likely could not deal with large scale encryption adoption. Scare tactics it is then.

For me it´s not a theory, thats what I said in my comment and I´m pretty sure they ARE actually using these articles to discourage people from using encryption.

Your idea of seeding some /dev/random or attaching some /dev/random to emails sounds like a great idea, and also funny, to me. We should definitely do that!

Is 1 gigabyte fine?

Make a quick website (hosted on Github or whatever), with a bunch of torrent links to a bunch of huge encrypted files.

Then spread the word and give them something to spy on.

Wouldn´t they probably find that github and just discard those torrents from their cryptanalysis?

What if some percentage of the torrents there were used to transmit secret information?

1GB per 1B of hidden data. Let's see how fast we can fill their storage.

Actually, if enough of these spring up on various trackers, chances are some real terrorist organization may actually end up making one of these files (but with actual information).

I say we go for it.

Yeah, probably.

Alternatively, we could set up a mesh of dropbox/cloud accounts. People would connect in pairs and generate their own huge files of garbage. Then they would copy it into each of their dropbox directories and it would propagate n times. If everyone does this every day (write a script to generate random data), there will be a continuous stream of randomly encrypted files across the network. When your cloud drive fills up, delete older files.

While I wouldn't put something like that past them, I don't think that's the case here unless it's part of a much larger conspiracy where Snowden is deliberately leaking misinformation on behalf of the NSA. Because the evidence behind this revelation is a DoJ document signed by the Attorney General authorizing exceptions to the ban on collecting U.S. data, and it was given to The Guardian by Snowden.

Oh great. That would mean this is the lesser evil of the other potential scandals.

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