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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if, more than crypto, false positives would make them work harder. They know who you are emailing too, and so likely are not going to target you in any case, since you are not part of an interesting network.

But if you start talking about a movie, where they plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Times Square or something...

Emacs automates this with M-x spook:

morse War on Terrorism encryption Forte Blowpipe LLNL John Kerry Albright Kh-11 22nd SAS ANC Semtex SEAL Team 6 smuggle CIA

Also, everyone here from the US has placed a phone call to their representatives to politely, succinctly, and clearly state their opposition to this stuff, right? Ultimately, a political solution is best. False positives make them waste their time, and there are a lot of them who probably really do care about catching genuinely bad people who want to do bad stuff. Just that they need less secrecy, more focus, and much more oversight.

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6 degrees, though. The network of connecting one person to any other person on the earth is usually quite small.

Hmm.. here's a silly idea.

A peer to peer network, let's go with a cool web-2.0-ey name like Chaffr, that assigns you a GUID and establishes a stream of truly random (or pseudorandom) data which is propagated out via a P2P system kinda the same way Tor nodes communicate with each other.

This stream of noise is generated and runs 24x7. Might require a hardware dongle of some kind to keep the entropy pool full enough.

This data is random for the most part, but if you have the GUID of another user, you can send them messages which will be encoded into the stream and received by the other person either immediately, at a set time, or at a random time inside a given window.

Garbage, uncompressable, unusable data for the snoops (and the nature of the system as explained in the Snowden leaks will require them to store every useless byte), an anonymous, decentralized communication network for everyone else.

They can buy hard drives much faster than the 2000 people who would run such a thing can upload data. It's a nice thought, though.

You would still have to encrypt that though, which reintroduces the problems of key management and authentication/trust. I'm sure that issue is resolvable though, although I would expect that most ISPs simply drop that type of traffic completely as it can only hurt their operations. So you'd also need to find ways to route around ISPs that don't choose to participate in this.

haha, I just tried M-x spook, I didn't think it would actually work.

Here was my output:

national information infrastructure Ceridian INSCOM supercomputer AIEWS Afghanistan Blowpipe chameleon man sweep M-14 hackers Roswell lock picking codes spies

second time:

world domination cracking Operation Iraqi Freedom IRA Reno analyzer M-14 David John Oates electronic surveillance pipeline INS security Tony Blair national information infrastructure ASLET

""" spook is an interactive compiled Lisp function.

(spook)

Adds that special touch of class to your outgoing mail. """

  ; Variables
  (defgroup spook nil
    "Spook phrase utility for overloading the NSA line eater."
    :prefix "spook-"
    :group 'games)

  (defcustom spook-phrases-file (expand-file-name "spook.lines" data-directory)
    "Keep your favorite phrases here."
    :type 'file
    :group 'spook)

  (defcustom spook-phrase-default-count 15
    "Default number of phrases to insert."
    :type 'integer
    :group 'spook)

Looks like it'd be a good idea to update and expand the spook.lines file.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4z09el30f8 Trevor Moore's take on this idea.

This is great; I have got to find an excuse to use 'M-x spook'.

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