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NZ Professor Advocates Civil Disobedience Against Mass Surveillance

Posted by samzenpus on from the fight-the-power dept.

nut writes "We're all aware of how much surveillance we are under on the internet thanks to Edward Snowden. Gehan Gunasekara, an associate commercial law professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, wants us all to start sending suspicious looking but meaningless data across the internet to overload automated surveillance systems. Essentially he is advocating a mass distributed Bayesian poisoning attack against our watchers."

5 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Need to Do More by Jherek+Carnelian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just sending a bunch of keywords in email isn't enough - emacs has had a spook function since the 80s so they are kind of used to that stuff by now./ You'll have to act like a crazy-pants terrorist.

    To make it really work we need to bring the eternal september to the islamic extremist websites. Everybody go post on those arabic jihadi websites. Uh, does anyone know of any arabic jihadi websites? Or how to read and write arabic?

    1. Re:Need to Do More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Under UK Law, downloading this could result in a prison sentence.

    2. Re:Need to Do More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In high school, I got in interested in explosive chemistry, so I had a local bookstore order The Anarchists Cookbook for me. The easiest recipes are the most dangerous. I asked my grandfather to get me the materials for the easiest and most-powerful thing to make (because he knew everyone, and could get anything), and he basically told me I was crazy. I was asking to make the detonator that he loaded into howitzer shells during the war. The stuff was so sensitive, they tested it by firing shells through PAPER. I was still determined to make SOMEthing that exploded.

      Then my chemistry teacher (who I was very close to) caught wind of what my best friend and I were up to. One day, he didn't lecture or give us a lab. He did a demo. While he talked about the weather, or some other nonsense, he very calmly distilled a couple of drops of 100% nitric acid. He didn't explain any of this; I just knew enough about it to know what was going on. He then poured HALF of that couple of drops into a fire tube and stuffed a wad of test tube straw packing material into it. He continued to talk while the nitric acid effused into the straw. He then started a wood splint on fire, and held it towards the open end of the fire tube, which he had placed at a 45-degree angle. The straw ignited, and the wad shot about 12 or 15 feet across the room. I understood that he had just made very weak dynamite, and saw how powerful that was, and immediately resigned to not screw around with trying to make explosives. He never explained why he did it, to me, or the rest of the class, but I learned the lesson as clearly as I ever learned any.

  2. You first! by Seumas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fifteen years ago, I'd have been all for causing a disruption. Exercising my self-evident liberties and thwarting The Man, when he came down on me for it.

    Now, I have a fucked up back from a car crash, a fucked up knee from wrestling, a mortgage, people depending on me, a professional career, and neighbors. The amount of ways they could absolutely obliterate my life at their slightest whim are uncountable. As much as I'm all about people doing something and not just playing "Reddit-pretend-rebel/protestor", we are beyond the time of, say, the 90s -- where civil disobedience and voicing your dissent or even just being a vocal weirdo just got you either a knock on the door or a two hour trip into and out of your local lockup. We're in a time where you become an instant "child molester" or you just disappear or your finances go all permanently wonky, or you get "investigated" and now your neighbors and employer and coworkers all wonder what you've been up to that has raised the interest of The Man.

    1. Re:You first! by aralin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The amount of ways they could absolutely obliterate my life at their slightest whim are uncountable. We're in a time where you become an instant "child molester" or you just disappear or your finances go all permanently wonky, or you get "investigated" and now your neighbors and employer and coworkers all wonder what you've been up to that has raised the interest of The Man.

      This is to a dot the same justification my father gave me for joining and staying in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia back in 1985. I was taught early on in my adolescence not to stick the head out, mind my own business and ignore the governemt abuses of power.

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.