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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?"
For Gods sake people, what's wrong with you?! Write your Senators & Reps, and if they don't do anything, then vote these assholes out of office when the elections come! Donate money to the ACLU.
Seriously people, technologies won't help you hold on to your freedoms. There's no silver bullet. You have to do it for yourselves!
I'm sorry, but if they want you, they pretty much have you. Your only hope is to be so utterly dull that nobody wants you. You pretty much have to have no life whatsoever. Since you're asking for advice on Slashdot, I'd say you're safe.
You trust the system of a country with cameras on every corner, and a government that wants to hold you for 90 days so they have enough evidence to charge you with something?
Our judicial system on this side of the pond may have once been similar to yours, but you guys seem to be going down the 1984 route a lot faster than we are.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
~~~~~~~
"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
Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.
Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/
DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography
=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages
!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org
and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt
to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)
SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR
Fill USENET with garbage? I was pretty sure that was already happening...
-Splat