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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Since I (and the majority of global internet users) are not "US persons", they're claiming they're entitled to intercept and store all my communications anyway - so my personal reaction to this is going to be to increase the use of tor and crypto for random everyday stuff. I'll start GPG encrypting email to anybody I know will be able ro deal with it. I might even start randomly mailing GPG encrypted mail for no reason except to thwart traffic analysis (perhaps I'll automate mailing randomly chosen chunks of 1984 and Brave New World to randomly chosen public keys/emails from public keyservers - perhaps some faceless NSA analyst might one day have burned countless cpu-years decrypting my 2048bit GPG mail, only to be Rickrolled with a 70 year old cautionary tale about themself…)

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"I will start GPG encrypting email to anybody I know who will be able to deal with it"

As sad as it is to say, lets be honest and admit that this is a fairly small number. How long do you think it will be till your less committed friends get tired of decrypting your emails and just ignore what you send? Make sure you only pick people that use actual email clients because gpg and Gmail is no fun.

As far as the "Thomas Crowne Affair attack" goes generating effective cover traffic is not easy and random traffic is definitely a bad idea. Basic traffic analysis would be able to separate your legit emails from your cover traffic.

Addendum: I noticed you just generated your new gpg key yesterday. Why not go big and use a 4096 bit key?

It seems someone has written a PGP extension for Chrome/GMail: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mymail-crypt-for-g...

I've just started using mailvelope, which works with several webmail providers and also has a firefox extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mailvelope/kajibbe...

It looks like Mailvelope only supports RSA encryption (up to 4096bit), not any of the other types of algorithms for PGP. It lists RSA/RSA and RSA/ElGamal but doesn't allow me to select them. Can someone who knows their shit about encryption chime in as to whether that's sufficient?

Now I'm thinking of a patched SMTP server, that queues all outgoing mail - and sends mail every hour on the hour to each of my GPG enabled recipients, with a queued "real mail" if there is one or a random encrypted NSA RickRoll if there's no real mail to send.

(I suspect that'd last about 121 minutes before most of my friends spam filtered me forever)

Don't forget you have to use your main machine to send the random messages to your smtp server. If you do not it will be pretty easy to recognize what mail was routed through the machine and which messages were randomly generated by the server as a cover traffic.

Every protocol should allow "no-ops" of arbitrary size, and then make it easy to do traffic analysis defeat by doing communications scheduling like that.

> perhaps some faceless NSA analyst might one day have burned countless cpu-years decrypting my 2048bit GPG mail, only to be Rickrolled with a 70 year old cautionary tale about themself…)

That, sir, is genuis. Now that talibans have office in qatar, I hope they'll publish some kind of contact email, so we can rickroll both NSA and them through tormail. Sorry authoritarians, this is the internet.

To thwart email traffic analysis, what we really need is tor-over-email relays: you n-fold encrypt your email, one for each relay node, and the innermost message is encrypted for the intended recipient.

If the US wants "freedom" on the internet and no internet nationalism (which just means that non-citizens get rights too), it should grant online citizenship to all people of the world. They can all be members of the empire and actually get representation rather than just the tyranny of US foreign policy.

> perhaps I'll automate mailing randomly chosen chunks of 1984 and Brave New World to randomly chosen public keys/emails from public keyservers

Repurpose Sircam to do this, perhaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sircam

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