Comment by michael_storm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_storm | Hacker News Reader

Continue this for megabytes worth of bridges (xks-0001), and it'll totally mess up XKeyScore. It has no defense against getting flooded with information like this, as far as I can see.

Yet it would be trivial to defend against trivial attacks like this. They just need to set a length limit on ingested messages, clean up those regexes, and they're done. A clever NSA developer (of which I'm sure they have several) might implement a garden-variety spam filter.

We're trying to inject noise, but this noise is obvious. It's like a nation-state playing Cold War-era radio games by broadcasting "DOUBLE AGENT X COME HOME, DOUBLE AGENT Y COME HOME", etc. Sure it's noise, and it might distract them for five minutes, but it doesn't win the war.

Want to fight XKeyscore? Make the noise impossible to distinguish. Set up free email accounts that bounce randomly-generated "interesting" messages among themselves, in between notes to Mom about the World Cup. Get open source software that uses network communication to piggyback some keyword-laden (though non-incriminating) text onto messages it would send anyway. Run a Tor exit node that blocks illegal activity in your country (so you don't go to jail).

Or someone else should, at least. I'm busy. And now, I'm on a list.

We need to use the world's best anti-anti-spam technology. The stuff that generates random spam message texts to sneak past spam filters. Maybe combine something like SCIgen [1] with a corpus of "interesting" texts?

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

I'm guessing they care a lot about the network, not just the content. They'll realise you work in IT, tag you as "linux using trouble maker", then mostly ignore you. Unless you work for the NSA, then they'll kick you out, and maybe send some people over to search your home.

You seem rather comfortable in your knowledge of this.

I have no inside information. But they aren't doing it, they are complete idiots. And I don't think they are idiots.

I am not a lawyer. I would imagine you could be charged with 'obstruction of justice' or some other such law if you did this in the US or as a US citizen. Something to think about before doing such a thing.

edited to be more verbose

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-73

This is the federal obstruction of justice statute, could you point out the part that applies to jamming the illegal collection of inadmissible evidence by an agency that enforces no laws or regulations and conducts no criminal or administrative investigations or proceedings?

No, I'm not a lawyer and/or qualified to do that. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't care to find out by attempting it.

This is an unintentionally perfect demonstration of the concept of chilling effects. Someone should take a screenshot of this and put it into a textbook.

Wikipedia link on chilling effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

The fear of getting caught shouldn't be the only reason you don't do something. Either it's important enough to do, or there's multiple reasons doing something isn't a good idea.

You're absolutely right. The government, NSA, et al, would definitely not take anyone to court over this. That's the wrong tool for this job.

Trolling the NSA to prosecute someone for 'obstruction of justice' for essentially being a nuisance, is a dream scenario for the ACLU/EFF/EPIC/et al.

did I ask for my connection to be wiretapped?

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