Distracting the NSA

To all thinking up ways to "distract NSA" - keep in mind that they employ skilled magicians that know how to use crazy spells and are smarter than most of us here. Oh, and they also have several orders of magnitude more money.

By magic I obviously mean math, which is the real-world equivalent, at least for information. The kind of math that leads to reading signals -30db below noise level by handheld devices (aka. GPS). The kind of math that leads to extracting causality graph out of data collected on a single point in time. The kind of math that leads to recreating your social graph out of small bits of metadata. And those are only the things invented some time ago that now everybody knows how to do. What they can, and do, now, we don't know.

So basically any scheme to "distract NSA" should be assumed to be able only to give them some good laughter, until proven otherwise by some mathemagicians.

I find all of these attempts to "troll" or "distract" the NSA quite naive. If they truly have direct access to the backbone cables of the internet, then they must be pretty good at filtering signal from noise. Just imagine the size of email/IM traffic compared to bittorrent.

If they can extract everyone's email messages from fiber-optic cables in real-time, then they surely are smart enough to create a filter that ignores just a list of words without any actual structure, like "Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center".

If you want to send a message these days to someone in secret, the simplest way would be to use a book cipher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher

The NSA would need to know the book and the cipher. Screw using mathematical encryption. For all we know it is now compromised.

As an added bonus, use text from spam email examples. Thus, the emails you send end up in the spam mail folder of the recipient. I imagine that the NSA will have optimised their hoover algorithm to exclude email that is spam. I mean, do they really need to log all of those 'enlarge your penis in 6 weeks' emails?

This isn't in response to current issues. It's very old. I remember it from ten years ago.

This brings an interesting point.

Before this what would happen? So you type "terrorist, bomb, drone, blah blah" in an email and send it to yourself perhaps. Does the NSA flag you and send your IP to the FBI and then you get a knock on the door. Wouldn't that reveal that they are spying and reading everything? It would probably so they might not do it. Quietly watch you from the shadows so to speak until you happen to walk into your gardening store to buy some fertilizer on day for your lawn.

Now, while it is good that we know the spying is happening, a more terrifying thing is about to go on and that is -- they can just openly come and arrest you for conspiracy to commit terrorism solely based on your online jokes for example. They know that everyone knows that they are spying so there is no need to hide their "tactics and procedures" anymore. They can come to your door and with plain unflinching face say "You sent this sentence to your friend on this day and hour as detected by NSA surveillance program, you are now under arrest ... blah blah ..."

So to recap. Without an overwhelming outrage from the masses this revelation will actually embolden them and will let them widen the scope and power of these programs.

Just attach an encrypted text of the Bill of Rights to every email. Be sure to re-encrypt every time so that they can't win back their storage by de-duping.

Would not a better way to do this be to take the spammer's approach? Spam has gotten to be quite good at sounding realistic. It's also normally quite naive. But instead of emailing real people, just setup a vast network of bot addresses that all mail each other in realistic ways. The content of the messages can be algorithmically generated to appear like nefarious conversations.

I'd love to see NSA and FBI members burning money and time tracking down spam bots.

It seems more like Distracting yourself to me.

I came up with a similar idea for a Chrome and Firefox plugin that, when you searched online, it would also search on everyone else's device that was running the plug in. Other people's searches would also be run on your device.

This way, it would be hard for them to track who did the original search and the amount of traffic going to the keyword would grow immensely, making it harder to find out if the search was real.

Or gives them more employees to tackle the problem?