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NZ Professor Advocates Civil Disobedience Against Mass Surveillance
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."
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?
What does that even mean?
Death metal to America!
We should do this, and make user-friendly encryption tools more widely available to the non-geek community as well.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I've been convincing as many people as I can to start using Retroshare as an IM program. It's encryption isn't the best - the NSA might be able to break it with a lot of effort, but they certainly can't do so for mass-surveillance. But it's compact, reliable, cross-platform (Though a rather fiddly compile), and it gets the IMs through. No central servers, all communications encrypted - you establish contacts by exchanging keys. And very hard to filter, as it doesn't run consistent ports and the preferred protocol is SSL with a UDP fallback. It can even do the UDP-dummy-start trick to get through a NAT at both ends, like Skype does. Plus it incorporates folder sharing, which means you can help to promote it by promising friends access to your folder-o-piracy.
Shameless as this plug is, I'm in no way affiliated with Retroshare. I just think it's a very nice piece of software, and more people should use it.
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.
Start with trackmenot and go from there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The traffic doesn't have to be meaningless. Join Freenet or another onion-routing network, and let your traffic be useful!
That's why said disinformation has to be automated and must not come from the person engaging in it. Preferably one should also make sure that the information how to get those automated tools is available not only on "relevant" pages but in circles that he usually does not frequent (because, say, if only people on /. have trackmenot and the like, that, too, is information).
The key is to not only mess with the information, but also the meta-information.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only thing that will is for all us basement dwellers to step outside and put our lives on the line. Those in power have too much to loose to give up without a lot of blood being spilled.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The targets of this idea are not people, but the automated systems that scan all content and communications for random keywords etc. The bots searching for starting points that can be investigated further by humans. The idea is that if too many false postitives are thrown up, the manual parts of the process get overloaded, reducing the value of the automated systems.
Once an individual has the attention of human spooks he's already past the point where this strategy is relevant. So your anecdote is valid, but slightly off-topic.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
I like the professor's idea. However, the problem is after this, there's an increased likelihood that they will deliberately allow the next attack (or even fake one), like many think they did at 9/11.
Watch for 9/11-esque nonsense explanation after the next attack.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas
http://ia601203.us.archive.org/5/items/milmanual-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook/tm_31-210_improvised_munitions_handbook.pdf
happy instant woody ;)
En what? 9/11 barelly killed half of what diarrhea kill EVERY DAY. Fighting diarrhea is far less costly than fighting this so called terrorism. The real terrorists are these states instilling fear of terrorism in the population. And let me laught when they say that they have so good information about a next terrorist attack that they need to stengthen the security worldwide and not just where the next attack would be. This is probably an attempt to talk about something else than snowden and the surveillance state in the medias...
I am all about civil disobedience as a nonviolent means of protest, but flooding the systems that are being used to protect against legitimate terror attacks is a woefully bad idea. I think it's better to protest publicly about domestic spying and vote out the assholes that perpetuate a police state. True, we want the unconstitutional actions to stop, but we certainly don't want hats on the ground because we flooded the systems that could have prevented a tragedy. That would send us even deeper into the hole because the asshats would then have ammo to backup their position. Grinding the current system to a halt sounds like a good idea on paper but will only strengthen the resolve of those asshats to make a better, darker system.
Okay, maybe this is just whooshing over my head, but ... "so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists"?
But, but, I WANT them to find the "actual terrorists".
I DON'T want them to accuse innocent people of being terrorists. I don't want them to break down doors with guns blazing because someone didn't answer the door fast enough. I don't want them to frighten young children (or adults that have the mental capacity of young children) at airports. I don't want the police to pay a visit to people just because someone Googled "pressure cookers" while his wife Googled "backpacks". I don't want them to arrest people for wearing suspicious T-shirts, or kick people off of airplanes because they are speaking Russian (or Arabic, or Spanish) to each other. I don't want them to shoot to kill because someone dark-skinned is running for the train. I do not want the police to act on false positives.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
Here's a better alternative: ask yourself what causes someone to become a terrorist; then ask yourself whether you're doing something in that list; then ask yourself whether those things you're doing are necessary and important enough that it's worth it to have terrorists being formed due to you doing them; then, if the answer is "no", stop doing them. That's a good way to not have terrorists appearing, or at least to not have a majority of them appearing, meaning you won't have to worry about catching that which doesn't exist anymore.
An alternative is to do a cost-benefit analysis. In which position, relative to all other troubles are terrorism-caused violence, destruction and death? 1st place, 2nd, 3rd, 100th, 1000th? Adjust your priorities accordingly. If something kills 'n' more people than terrorists, it should be worth 'n' times more of your time than terrorism. Terrorism kills on average what? A few hundred people every year? There's stuff out there that kill a few hundred thousand people every year. Ask yourself: why aren't you worried a thousand times more about those?
Terrorism is a very minor problem. Giving it all this attention is a cognitive failure. There are much more objectively important issues out there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Bull feathers!
The cause of most wars and terrorism is us-versus-them. Different religions provide a dividing line between "us" and "them", but it can just as easily be ethnic origins, skin color, language, political views, gang affiliation, or any other marker.
But I still completely disagree that it should be anybody's goal to ensure that "the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists."
The problem is that someone's an actual terrorist only after actually committing some terrorist activity or at least helping someone who did. Trying to go after people who are "thinking about" committing an act of terrorism is going after someone for a thought crime. No, the appropriate approach is to focus on prevention. You try the best you can, upper bound by an objective cost-benefit analysis, to prevent such acts from being successful. And if it so happens that one such act goes through the prevention efforts and end up happening, then you go after those who *now* have actually become criminals to prosecute and punish them to the full extent of their *actual* crime.
There's no place in a free society for thought crimes. Widespread surveillance is unneeded both in principle and in practice.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The surveillance is not for terrorists; terrorists learned long ago not to use electronic comms. Even as far back as 9/11, the bad guys did not use cell phones or email. No, the surveillance is not for terrorist, it is for us. They are searching for other issues such as threats to Wall Street, or copy write infringements, etc., i.e. threats to their money and power. That is where you should flood the airwaves...
This will never work because it assumes that the purpose of the surveillance state is to 'fight terrorism'.
This is incorrect. The purpose of the surveillance state is to consolidate power in the hands of the elite. The target isn't terrorists using keywords like 'bomb' etc. The targets are everyone, using whatever words they use and doing whatever they do in their normal life.
The real intention is to give those at the top, unlimited, total information surveillance powers against their enemies, WHOMEVER they may be at any time. You want that supreme court decision to go your way? Read the private email and listen to the private conversations of the swing justice to gain insight to his thinking and shape your arguments correctly. If that fails, use the information to blackmail him.
You want to influence the elections? Analyze the big-data you have on the entire population in the voting district to figure out their private thoughts on issues and advertise accordingly.
You want to start a war? Use the knowledge you have to leverage the actors you have creating mainstream news to shape the country's views.
There were already laws against bombing or shooting people. The terrorism is the slight of hand that allows you to target people who have not committed crimes.
Liberty.
As a pretend Political Officer, I had to come up with a bunch of meaningless (but familiar sounding) political sayings for a POW training exercise once.
"The People Know Best, And I Speak For The People" was a good one .. especially when I forced the poor long-suffering POWs to try to explain its meaning.
Some of my fellow NCOs were looking at me a bit oddly for a while, until they finally got the point.
"Humility Is A Smile In The Eye Of Your Mother" was another favorite :-)
So you'd better be careful, look closely at how this could all be presented by a prosecutor .. or the first few hundred trying this convincingly enough may get a wee bit more attention than they expected. Kind of like the first few ranks in the protest march .. encountering .50 cal's in The Man's anti-riot barricades.
Of course they say the weather at Gitmo isn't so bad in the winter months.