Time For X-No-Wiretap HTTP Header?

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.'"

Comments

Asking them nicely will stop help?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way we are going to solve this NSA mess is to clean house...and the senate...

Re:Asking them nicely will stop help?

[Oysterville]

Somewhere along the line you were given the incorrect information that the US House and Senate have complete oversight of NSA, when in reality it's more accurately the other way around.

Almost as good as Evil BIt!

[CrystalFalcon]

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

Re:Almost as good as Evil BIt!

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

The Evil Bit is only defined under IPV4, time to update the specs.

You don't beg for privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

You secure it by force.

USA citizens safe, not care rest of world??

[Anonymous Coward]

It is always so irritating to see that this discussion turns into "I am USA citizen, do not spy on me, dear NSA!" What about rest of the world?? How come that in your US centric viewpoint it's all ok to spy on anyone else, just not on US citizens?? What about Europe? Other NATO allies? All ok to spy on everyone else, on your viewpoint!! Love that fat bellybutton of yours!

Re:USA citizens safe, not care rest of world??

[AxeTheMax]

Yes, Americans who think they value their liberty have a tendency to forget that their liberty depends also on the liberty of others. Starting with the slaves who their founding fathers conveniently forgot, now it is terrorists, criminals, citizens of 'enemy' countries, and finally all non citizens. As has been seen recently, spying on non-citizens gives the means to spy on citizens. What Americans have really is not liberty but power, and the Golden Rule (reciprocity) is inessential when you have power.

And the rest of the world?

[lurker412]

Few American commentators seem to be questioning the unstated assumption that spying on non-Americans is perfectly OK, even if there is no reasonable cause for suspicion. By that logic, it's perfectly OK for other countries to spy on all Americans.

Aren't we all entitled to a little privacy?

Do you think this will stop NSAGul Black Riders?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

They are already deliberately violating the law, with impunity. They compromise your security at every step. Adding un-encrypted metadata to your traffic will only:
1 - ID you for possible actions by later custodians of this information
2 - Acknowledge your silent submission to the fact of universal collection as a normative state
3 - Divert efforts from real crypto-countermeasures

People need not to give NSA their complicity and assent, but to resist, and applaud every time somebody manages to FUCK UP their mission.

Dangerous Crypto mistake - my testing results

[Freshly Exhumed]

When I saw that this proposal "deprecates all the SSL/TLS ciphers in favor of Double CAESAR’13" (a.k.a. ROT-13) I knew it was going to be great. BTW, a big shoutout to my friends over in the Caesarian section! Okay, so I needed to run some sandboxed tests first. After using Double ROT-13 everything was going perfectly, according to the spec, but I decided to gamble on TRIPLE ROT-13. Big mistake. Don't do it! All I ended up with was a bunch of gobbledegook that I couldn't work with anymore, so I had to just delete everything and start all over again. Don't use TRIPLE ROT-13!!!!!!!1

I wish I could have been FP to warn everyone. I'm glad this proposal sticks with Double!

Re:Do you think this will stop NSAGul Black Riders

[TCM]

Liberties going down the drain, secret laws, secret courts, secret prisons, killing people without any trial, but at least we still have stupid nerd jokes in the form of funny HTTP headers.

Haha, I'm so not laughing.

Re:Do you think this will stop NSAGul Black Riders

[Concerned Onlooker]

Well, then, I suggest we invoke the other Poe's law: Nevermore!