[javajosh]

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many.

It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them?

My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include extra data. Browser components that load other pages in the background. Phones that text at random. Snail mail to nowhere.

You're gonna snoop on all my data? Take it ALL and choke on it.

[mistercow]

Essentially what you're proposing is a DoS of the tracking system. The problem with that (at least with physical mail) is that it takes far more resources to generate physical mail than to scan it. A DoS shaped like that will never work unless you have some way of massively amplifying the effect you are having.

Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents. How many postcards do you reckon you'd have to send before the automatic scanning process costs even one cent extra?

[atgm]

> Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents. How many postcards do you reckon you'd have to send before the automatic scanning process costs even one cent extra?

It seems like it would be a self-defeating process since the cost built into sending "data flak" would pay for the services monitoring it.

[jasonkolb]

I've been thinking about the fact that a data-generation machine would be incredibly destructive to the current intelligence system. Spend a little bit of resources on a system that will manage and nurture online personas and you could render the algorithms watching things useless.

Misdirection: it's been used in magic for a long, long time.

So what happens when a piece of software can be used as a terrorist device? We're going to run into that. Soon.

[malandrew]

I would imagine the DoS is half of the benefit. The other half is manufactured reasonable doubt.

If a person were to send periodic letters with real and fake cryptographic messages to random individuals of importance, barring a warrant to read the contents of each letter, that would constitute reasonable doubt as to whether or not that person was legitimately communicating with another person of interest.

[mistercow]

It would also likely be taken as suspicious in its own right.

[malandrew]

True, but given the facts of the past few weeks, it's completely reasonable to set up such a system like this now for yourself as a hedge for what the political landscape may look like in the future. I know what is illegal today, but I have no idea what may be made illegal tomorrow or 10 years from now. Implementing such a system is a hedge/insurance against dystopian futures that are becoming reality.

As long as such a system is in place and significantly predates (on the scale of years) any crime you are accused of, this argument of hedging against a dystopia makes a lot more sense and is far more defensible.

[finnw]

> I know what is illegal today

That is impressive, even if you are a lawyer.

[malandrew]

Hehe. Yeah, I know. :)

[javajosh]

Yes, they might suspect that I value the freedoms that so many have fought and died for that I would, shockingly, moderately inconvenience myself to do so.

[dredmorbius]

Which means you could undertake the activity on behalf of those you wished to implicated.

[GoodIntentions]

>>Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents.

why put a stamp on if you don't care about where it goes? better yet, put a 1 cent stamp on and make sure it gets extra handling for postage due.

[bentcorner]

A mail proxy is what is needed (I have no idea if these exist today).

Put your letter inside an envelope to a mailing proxy. Mailing proxy opens your letter, and sends your recipient a letter from them.

There are more opportunities for misdirection - the mailing proxy service can internally shuffle letters around and add mailing delays to discourage external analysis.

Although, even with all that, I'm unsure of the effectiveness of this approach. It's usefulness also scales with the number of people willing to use such a service.

Does the gov't need a second warrant to open a letter-in-a-letter?

Alternatively, you could use a peer-to-peer mailing scheme - advertise your mailing address as a mailing "node". People who want to "use" you send you a letter, and inside that letter they write a letter to the intended recipient, with the sender addressed as you. When you receive such a letter, you merely open the one addressed to you, and drop the inner letter in the mailbox. Nest as many letters as you want and have your letter "hop" around the world.

[anigbrowl]

Does the gov't need a second warrant to open a letter-in-a-letter?

Interesting question; I'm guessing no, unless the interior letter contained obviously privileged material (eg 'Dear Father, I hope you are well; enclosed is a letter I received from your lawyer after you departed, which I forward to you unopened. Your Loving Son.'), in which case a warrant would probably not issue for the contents.

[fnordfnordfnord]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/30/us/30postal-ma...

Section I B - allows the contents of unsealed classes of mail "as allowed by law"

Section II B - "...Mail Covers do not authorize the search, seizure, or opening of any class of mail."

Section III B 6 - addresses attorney-client privilege.

[anigbrowl]

None of which is responsive to the question asked above, which was about a letter that was lawfully opened pursuant to a warrant, but which contained a second, sealed letter.

[ipsin]

Interestingly, postmasters can act as mail proxies.

A stamp collector who wants a particular cancellation stamp can send a letter to the postmaster containing a letter and a note: "Please postmark and deliver".

I have used this in the past to play small tricks on friends, and to send them mail from far-away places.

Per the article, the entire course of your letter is tracked, so this should never be used when actual privacy is desired.

[clarkm]

Why stop at just a single-hop proxy? Just go full out onion routing. Here's a paper for an anonymous physical delivery system, named APOD, based on that model:

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf

[IsThisObvious]

More interesting if you could make a mechanical one that would remove one envelope and forward the letter.

Then each data facility could reasonably process a few thousand letters a day, batching them for the postal service. After a few rounds of mixing, if there was significant facility-to-facility traffic, it would become impractical to find any specific letter's path.

Time for real world implementations of our high-latency packet routing algorithms?

[nitrogen]

The next step is building such a system for personal transportation pods, so nobody really knows where you're traveling ;-). However, you'll have to pack enough food to be shuffled across the country several times on underground pneumatic tubes as your personal carrier onion is unwrapped and retransmitted.

[btbuildem]

Not sure, they'll just throw more resources at the problem.

I think the problem is in "the few". If they snoop on us, we should be able to snoop on them -- especially since it's our tax dollars that pay their salaries and (although yes it's a joke of a broken system) we elect these officials more or less directly.

Just to level the field a little bit. For example, London is full of CCTV cameras -- why is it that only a small group of twisted perverts has access to the feeds? The cameras are in public places, the public should be able to see what the cameras are seeing.

[robeasthope]

It's a bit much to call bored security staff perverts and opening up the data to the public is guaranteed to attract the crazies - Would you want your (crazy) ex to be able to follow your new love life with a new partner via CCTV?

FYI it's not all bad: the UK automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) CCTV network run by the police (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK) is currently being legislated by the Coalition to bring it under statutory regulation - considering the revelations about police conduct over undercover cops it can't come to soon either.

P.S. Bless the UK gov, a full surveillance state can't happen because it's rubbish at IT: 'The current restraints on police use of ANPR data have been dictated by pragmatism rather than a concern for civil liberties. Giving every police officer free access to the system would overload the system, "make it unstable, slow it down", said John Dean, National ANPR co-ordinator for the Association of Chief Police Officers.'

[kintamanimatt]

I've known one of those people that watch those cameras and I'd struggle to call him a pervert. He's was just normal guy who paid his bills by doing an incredibly dull job. All it came down to was making sure that when petty shit happens in the street (drunken fights, etc), the police and so on are called to the scene.

I'm usually someone that's very fond of privacy, but I'm not entirely sure I have any qualms with CCTV in public places and in fact I'd love to hear arguments against them.

[Torgo]

I had a friend who worked as a security guard at a factory. Sometimes I would come down and visit him in the guard shack. He showed me a controller he could use to point a security camera, and he excitedly showed me how it could be pointed and zoomed directly at the bedroom windows of several of the houses on the other side of the fence. And yes, we peeped. It was so easy and there was no way to be caught that it perverts your morals. You would have to be a strong person to resist the temptation. This was in the 1990s. Mass surveillance destroys the dignity of both the people spied on and those doing the spying.

[criley2]

Aren't the majority of London's CCTV's privately owned and operated?

[enraged_camel]

They will simply allocate more resources to it and you as the taxpayer will end up paying for it.

The only real solution is to have end-to-end encryption that is easy to understand and use.

[anigbrowl]

How are you going to encrypt your snail mail destination data?

[nthj]

Interesting. From a strictly technical perspective (this is impractical), we could set up a warehouse somewhere in the country which accepted incoming mail (tagged with an ID number), dumped the entire package into a plain manilla envelope, then sent it on to the final address.

The final address would be set up via an encrypted web service, so only you and the warehouse know who sent the mail & where the final destination is.

Of course, then the NSA would just take the warehouse's private encryption keys, so it'd only work for about 48 hours, but yeah, you know. Technically possible.

[anigbrowl]

You know, you're not obliged to put a return address on regular mail as long as it has sufficient postage. It's required for various kinds of commercial mail, or mail requiring special handling eg delivery confirmation).

[nitrogen]

Apparently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011) the letter can still be tracked by looking up the return addresses and point of origin of letters with neighboring unique IDs.

[anigbrowl]

Well, if you're anxious for privacy to the point of omitting your return address, you should probably not rely on the nearest mailbox to your home.

[xyzzy123]

It would cost more, but what if the warehouse were outside the U.S?

[unreal37]

You could send mail to the wrong address intentionally. Like you want to send mail to 3 Main Street, but you write "5 Main Street" instead. The person who receives it will say "Ah, this is for Joe. He lives next door!" and hand deliver it.

That's mostly sarcasm. There's no getting around the tracking if you want to use regular USPS mail or Google Gmail. Just go meet in person, and leave your cell phones at home.

[ISL]

Make sure you walk or go by bicycle or public bus, too. Untracked personal communication and conveyance over long distances is hard in the present system.

[conroe64]

By putting another letter inside that may or may not contain another letter ad infinitum, where each letter is sent to a random address except the most inner letter which is sent to the actual address. In each outer letter you put a five dollar bill and the words "Mail this or else, I know where you live!"

[jlgreco]

> "Mail this or else, I know where you live!"

That is a great way to get your letter not mailed. A simple "Please" would work much better.

[ippisl]

This is not an ease of use problem. Using something like textSecure or redPhone is relatively easy and helps greatly with creating a private channel[1]. But there's still a huge marketing problem.

[1]There's still the problems of metadata and backdoors and of legislation around encryption.

[malandrew]

You really need both. Creating noise reduces the perceived ROI on the current programs, making them harder to justify.

[enraged_camel]

Nothing is difficult to justify when you can just say "but... but... terrorists!" and get away with everything.

[adventured]

You could never create enough flak to keep up with the hyper expansion of capacity and processing power. Snail mail data and things like voice calls are not getting larger or more complex and will not; ditto the text in email or on facebook and twitter.

Run a 30 second calculation on any of the power laws working on bandwidth, processing power, or storage, and you should realize very quickly it's impossible to flak the system to death (and that's assuming a lot of people participated).

There are only two practical approaches to what's going on. 1) fix the political system 2) encryption

Adding flak is convoluted and ineffective compared to the elegance and efficiency of encryption (not to mention flak doesn't necessarily conceal anything, whereas encryption can).

[javajosh]

> You could never create enough flak to keep up with the hyper expansion of capacity and processing power.

I can create enough flak to confuse a casual, or even somewhat interested observer. If the flak is smart enough (smart flak, heh) then it would be hard to differentiate between actual and fake traffic.

More to the point, not all flak is equal. You can create noise around services that you appreciate and admire, even if you don't use them yourself, creating what essentially amounts to a mild, benevolent DOS attack (mild because it would have to generate messages at human scale).

Data flak is perfect for web-browsing, but messaging is more problematic. Perhaps encryption is the key (no pun intended) but key distribution is still a problem. What you know, what you have, who you are.

A combination of the two could be killer: send 10 encrypted messages to people; 9 of them don't have the right key, so they get thrown out. The 10th can read it. And the meta-data is noisy as hell.

[rcavezza]

I agree with the notion that this is "NOT OK". I generally feel that about most things that have surfaced in the past few weeks. My problem is that I really have no idea what I can do to help or show my disapproval.

I think we really need to go back to a checks and balances type of government instead of a top heavy executive branch. This lack of checks and balances is the root cause of the issues but I really don't know if there's anything I or we can do about it.

I'm open to suggestions for specific action items. I'm extremely unsure of what I can do to help cause change.

[IsThisObvious]

> I'm open to suggestions for specific action items. I'm extremely unsure of what I can do to help cause change.

I'd argue that everything we're seeing is largely a symptom of the poor government structure in general, which has let two large parties entrench themselves and rig the electoral process, to make themselves virtually immune to any consequence to their actions.

The solution is changing voting policy in two ways: changing it to something besides the winner-takes-all system we have now; forcing voting districts to be concave polygons (with some algorithmic properties about minimizing area/edge length relative to certain other properties).

These two changes would a) break up the two parties by making it possible for others to compete and then essential to form coalitions and b) break up gerrymandering allowing the vote to actually reflect how the public felt.

[mxttr0]

Wrt suggestions: I recently became a contributing member of the EFF. This looked like the best move given the recent events.

[sageikosa]

Start an illegible letter writing campaign?

[clarkm]

There's an addon called TrackMeNot that does this, though I'm not sure it's very effective.

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

This also reminds me of the time the FCIC asked Goldman Sachs for some data and they proceeded to send them 5 TB of nearly useless documents.

Dumping people with large amounts of data seems like the modern equivalent of paying your parking ticket with pennies.

[loceng]

The problem is then you're still paying for it, and they'll just make your country go bankrupt - but their spying will be the last services they take money from.

[delinka]

The response will be more charges for extra data usage, and a cry from the public to have apps with leaner data appetites.