[jandrewrogers]

As much as I hate to disappoint everyone, chaffing with lots of keywords, made up searches, and arbitrary blocks of suggestive text will not trigger any kind of flag except "people trying (poorly) to chaff NSA".

The algorithms used for text mining are much more contextual and semantic than what would be fooled by the simple gags I commonly see on the Internet. Those gags might send a message of sorts but they don't make anyone's job more difficult. For a start, they know you are not a terrorist or whatever; nothing about your life as modeled across myriad data sources suggests that. Instead, you will be some random person pretending to stick it to The Man, which they don't care about and never lands in front of a person.

To chaff the state-of-the-art data mining would require some sophisticated computer science and sophisticated operations. You would (1) have to understand the state-of-the-art algorithms used and (2) devise a way to break those algorithms transparently. It is not a trivial task by any means even for someone that understands what is involved.

Superficial attempts to chaff surveillance systems might feel good but they won't accomplish much against a sophisticated adversary. The tech these days is much too good. Even leaving a minimal footprint for analysis is becoming nigh impossible.

[unfamiliar]

What if I create a new hotmail account which I use exclusively for emailing a random address in Pakistan, and after a few months delete all of my Facebook/gmail accounts and go completely off the grid save for this one email account which I start accessing from internet cafes dotted around the country, where I also look up information on Arabic websites about fertiliser... would that get their attention?

[hooo]

You've already got their attention.

[rapind]

He no longer has access to read your comment.

[notdrunkatall]

Yes.

[slavak]

So the only way to truly stick it to the man is to actually become a terrorist!

Show the government your disapproval of their trampling of the constitution. Join Al-Qaeda.

[melito]

As much this reads as FUD, I agree.

That's what I was getting at with my "Breaking Bad" comment.

A sort of "total depravity" is already a big part of pop culture, so it'd be easy to ignore false positives of people crying wolf.

What I was getting at is that what they're looking for is kind of a big unknown. If media about illegal things is so popular and they ignore it, it leads one to think that data being mined is possibly being used in a fashion similar to a personal agenda.

That's what's truly dangerous about monitoring at this scale. It's not so much that it's happening it's that they're creating something that could grant someone almost god like powers.

If I were to make an analogy, I'd say it's like a man buying a pistol to protect his family and then his child finds it loaded in a night stand.

[vajrabum]

It's funny you should mention godlike powers. We're pretty fast reaching a point where an individual can have "god like" powers for not very much $$$. You could argue that the genie isn't out of the bottle yet, but I think the point is arguable. As reprehensible as this sounds, maybe it'll turn out that whoever did the 2000 Anthrax attacks did the human race a favor.

[debacle]

It smells like you're talking out your ass.