Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

A couple of observations:

1) It seems that the NSA is intent on cataloging every connection of everyone in the world. The best way for "secure" communications then would be to send encrypted messages to a few thousand random addresses, only one of which is the intended recipient with the private key necessary to decrypt it. Everyone else can write it off as spam.

2) I thought it funny that NSA took the time to write in the slides that they are annoyed by Android's IMAP implementation ("Android implementation in particular uses a lot of bandwidth").

3) Why release redacted versions of stolen documents whose release in any form is a violation of federal law anyway? This is like cleaning up your mess after robbing a bank. Might as well release the whole thing.

for #1 I was wondering if you could build a messaging system where the sending system didn't know the location of the recipient. It also would mask the connection between sender and recipient. Basically you would send a message to a key to several servers in the network. Each server would look at the key, and if it matched their address they would store the message. They would also forward the message along so an outside observer wouldn't know that that server held that inbox. Basically 10 messages would come in and the same 10 would come out and maybe one would be stored, but you couldn't tell that. You would have to age out the messages, and I'm not sure if you could guarantee delivery. By observing the network you could tell where messages were originating, but not where they were terminating. That is the extent of the though I put into it, it's fun to think about but I'm sure there are many holes in the idea.

for #3 the post runs the stories they publish past the government to make sure they do not publish anything that would be truly damaging. After consulting with the government I assume they decide what to redact and what is ok to publish. I think this was the crux of the government case against Manning in regards to responsible v. reckless disclosure.

#1 sounds like it would satisfied by bitmessage: https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page

Reply on news.ycombinator.com