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Defending Against Surveillance?
Extrudedaluminiu asks: "With the recent news about domestic spying by the NSA, American citizens are put in a very difficult situation. Citizens in other countries, around the globe, also find themselves in situations where their lives can be examined by government agencies or other groups of questionable ethics. What can people in this kind of world do to defend themselves? Are there any approaches to thwarting or mitigating surveillance that will work on a mass scale? What technologies can people use to hold on to their freedoms, in a difficult world?"
Encrypt everything. Don't make it obvious what is important and what isn't and force "them" to waste lots of processor cycles to get Aunt Betty's cobbler recipe. I'm planning to convert all my web sites to HTTPS.
Also, help throw up smoke screens. Spare bandwidth can be used to send random garbage - some of it should be truly random so no amount of work will allow someone to conclude that they have successfully decrypted usless data but rather that they still have work to do.
Educate yourself so you know how to protect your rights in the event that you become an unjust target.
Donate to the EFF, ACLU or other rights-defender of your choice.
Write your legislators, support those who will defend your freedoms, fight those who don't, and vote.
And remember to separate the people, the goals and the techniques. There really are "bad guys" out there and we have many smart and dedicated people defending us against them. Help them where you can. But remember that they are all sworn to defend the Constitution (here in the U.S.) and it's up to us to make sure they remember and abide by that pledge. The ends do not always justify the means.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
"Are there any approaches to thwarting or mitigating surveillance that will work on a mass scale?"
Poison their databases.
Plan and publicize, but don't hold, activities which fall under their "threat" category but aren't actually threatening, ie. protests at military related sites.
Call a flash mob that happens to be at such a place, but don't let that fact on when calling it.
Make sure to be at grandma's for Sunday dinner when such things do or do not occur.
Put up a web site for a bogus anti-something organization and encrypt the hell out of the pages, those being fair use snippets out of "Cryptonomicon" or some such.
There's far more potential spookees than spooks.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
weeping the room with an AM radio,while switching channels.... hello? other frequency ranges?
Actually, this used to work with early miniature transmitters. In an effort to keep them small, very little attention was paid to what undesirable RF was being thrown off by the device.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Make yourself a cap visor and shoulder pads festooned with infrared LEDs. Cameras are sensitive to infrared radiation, and this will cause a bright halo around your face so you won't be identified by the cameras, yet people will not see the obstuctive light.