Time For X-No-Wiretap HTTP Header?

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 8, 2013 @03:25AM from the tongue-boring-through-cheek dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "A security blogger, acknowledging that the NSA methodically ranks communications on the basis of their 'foreignness' factor to determine candidacy for prolonged retention proposes, is proposing '...an opportunity for us on the civilian front to aid the NSA by voluntarily indicating citizenship on all our networked communications. Here, we define the syntax and semantics of X-No-Wiretap, a HTTP header-based mechanism for indicating and proving citizenship to well-intentioned man-in-the-middle parties. It is inspired by the enormously successful RFC 3514 IPv4 Security Flag and HTTP DNT header.'"

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Re:Almost as good as Evil BIt! by geek · 2013-09-08 03:32 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Yes, of course!
This is guaranteed to work almost as good as the Evil Bit, an extra field in IPv4 headers where senders of packets indicate malicious intent, so that people administering firewalls can discard such packets if desired.
(The problem in the first place was that the people wiretapping didn't give a shit about rules, etiquette, and being decent. More rules and etiquette aren't the solution to that problem.)
Rick
And yet people still pass laws to try and stop gun ownership. I mean clearly criminals obey the law and stop shooting people when we pass laws telling them not too. So why not include a header on our websites telling the NSA not to spy on us?