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Comment by bifrost | Hacker News Reader

> It's only that we didn't knew about it.

This has been well known since the 1990s (Eschelon, Carnivore, etc)

> All the big players can solve this issue for once and for all by providing end to end encryption.

You as the user really has to take responsibility for that, if the $BIGCO holds your keys, they can do whatever they want with them. I've put up GPG encrypted posts on Facebook, no big woo. Twitter is really only good w/ROT13 :P

The only thing thats sortof close to what you're looking for is OTR, but its only for instant messaging.

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I have this thought, but not sure if it can be considered a decent solution to achieve machine blindness?

One of the reasons why PRISM/computers or search works is because they can parse the text we type off our keyboards. Those character codes is what helps 'em look for key words, and enables the opportunity to snoop.

So instead if we doodle our text [1] in free-form and in language/lingo of our choosing (augment steganography with raw data/images) then we are perhaps closer to making it difficult for the snooping algorithms to parse and detect the keywords these people bank on.

I have significant reasons to believe that OCR across all languages for 400BB mails a day is next to impossible with available technology today. Given the diversity of handwriting/languages worldwide and the the fact that people can invent characters to communicate with each other, this could become an impeccable method.

[1] Example: https://bubbleideas.com/letters/the-tiger-by-sir-william-bla... (Observe the second half of the page that is handwritten. Since private mails are meant to be read only by intended recipient, we don't need to fret much about search. Basic tagging would be enough.)

Handwriting won't work against backdoors.Backdoors can send screen captures. And since handwriting is slower than typing , most of the times, people won't use it - so it will be a good signal that one is trying to hide something.

> Handwriting won't work against backdoors.Backdoors can send screen captures.

It will be very hard to find/detect context from screen captures without human intervention. Which means only those who need to be snooped will need to be snooped by the Gov, not everybody.

> And since handwriting is slower than typing , most of the times, people won't use it - so it will be a good signal that one is trying to hide something.

This one is important. The example that I linked above has been written off the iPad. On the iPad it's relatively fast to write by hand (clunky keyboards?), and with a Wacom Pentab too, but then this could be the earliest of such experiences that we're talking about. If Tech focus/innovation can be centered around it, people would love doodling as much as typing.

I just did a non-scientific test and it took me a similar time to write on an android smartphone(with a good keyboard) and on paper.

This might work.

But there are some tools for handwritten OCR:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/ocr/file-ocr/ocr-tool-for-hand-wr...

And if we aim for people to write clearly ,unlike doctors, handwritten OCR doesn't seem like a hard problem relative to machine vision in general.

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