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Comment by jpdoctor | Hacker News Reader

Something that seems to be missing from the current world: A P2P noise network.

A sufficient amount of encrypted noise emitting from many nodes makes the task of capturing and decoding everything quite a bit more challenging for an intrusive regime. Effectively, this is steganography: Everything should be encoded in cat pictures with an accompanying text of hot keywords.

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Ive been thinking about this and how to implement it, my conclusion was that NSA has the resources to filter out noise, especially seemingly random communication, as they already possess the social graph and have pretty good idea of who talks to whom and when. If suddenly a browser extension or app started sending "noise", to whom will it send it? A network? Where to get the list of IPs to spam? Just randomly? Just randomly is detectable! Thats easily filtered out - just exclude the network from the important data they tap. What if you randomly send a bunch of cat pictures and random noise to people of your contact list? This is called spam and receiving such, is not nice, as we can filter it on the receiving end, so can NSA filter it from their important calculations. But then you might think, lets send noise randomly and in the random noise let us communicate... meh, basically what a "P2P noise network" would do is increase the hassle and usability of computing systems for everyone involved but wouldnt really offer privacy for us.

When you kind of begin to make it less random, then you basically introduce plausible deniability and onions and begin solving problems that people are already working on and who need your help there more than "p2p noise network", then youre back to "lets make a good usable p2p anonymous/deniable communication system that can withstand NSA as advesary".

Still, it is an interesting idea, how to flood NSAs/FRA/GHCQs systems? Can we make a browser extension thats easy to use that would randomly GET pages from your history while you are actually away from computer - generating false content and increasing bandwidth usage, or a configurable spider to follow links/pages or even friends streams of choice? Would you use spammers techniques of markov chains to post random crap on open systems? Meh, thats still just an inconvenience for NSA.

What seems to be really important is who talks to who then how do you get in contact with strangers on the internet without NSA knowing? How would you know the stranger youre talking to isnt a cover agent?

As I understand, modern cryptography is distinguishable from "random". Onion and garlic routing provide more useful and productive ways of reaching the same goal.

Understood, I wrote random to emphasize no real communication is sent, just cat /dev/urandom and not in fact encrypted data. But of course, an adversary wouldnt be able to tell if it is something there or not.

> Just randomly is detectable!

Only after analysis, and only after some confidence level has been exceeded. And that is the point: Such analysis takes time and resource.

I believe the time and resources required for us to develop such a tool and the time invested of users to run it is much more than the total inconvenience it would cause to surveillence systems.

But please prove me wrong, Id love to run such a tool quite easily, even if it doesnt work, just for shits and giggles and just perhaps for that extra cent of cost and resources wasted of powerful organizations. (still kind of our taxpayer cents but...)

Would you run a simple browser extension that would GET pages while you are away, pages that your browser has seen in your history, and an advanced mode, pages on pastebin and a selection of forums/sources? Meh, could be done with a simple bash script and curl I guess for the advanced users. Would be nice if it could also crawl most news sources.

Stepping the idea up a bit, random but seemingly valid User-Agents, exchange of tracking cookies with other users of the extension, and click on all the ads! Would you use such a tool?

It's pretty easy to add ignore flags to messages. With good encryption I think it could be hard to distinguish between real and false messages without the key , and that seems like something that can be proven mathematically.

This is already done in a variety of networks for plausible deniability.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#DoI...

I2P does similar in making every user an internal participant. A network wholly dedicated to pushing redundant/null traffic is not a thing, AFAIK.

Tor, I2P and other networks I'm sure, methods of doing things are more "useful" by providing bandwidth whilst also giving cover traffic.

Sorry, I don't see where they are generating random noise or keywords from your link. The link seems to be discussing the merits of a relay of existing traffic.

Relaying 'existing' traffic is the "random noise". It provides obscure, 'random' traffic between nodes but serves a purpose by providing bandwidth.

The content of this traffic could easily be a useless packet, IRC, HTTP, etc.

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