From: "Albert P. Franco, II" <apf2@apf2.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 23:20:56 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Throwing Sand into the All-Seeing Eye (further ideas)
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19981217144631.006d1ae4@209.204.247.83>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Snipped some musings about throwing the NSA a lot of worthless bones to
chew on...

>We could rotate the tags around, but if we send too many of these, they can
>throw you into the above category.
>
>You could post them anonymously, which makes it much harder for them catalog,
>so they will be forced to look at the traffic, when and if, they need to
search
>it.
>
>You could have some program randomly alter your email address, but patterns
>would be found to filter you out that way.
>
>We could also use remailers to create lots of cover traffic going to
>/dev/null.  This would be far more interesting, especially if we add some
sort
>of poetry writer that spits out spook talk and update it occasionally with
>current event keywords.  Then again, they could filter the messages that
go to
>/dev/null, or find patterns in the spook poetry generators...  
>

Now how about instead of dev/null you periodically create free e-mail
accounts at hotmail, juno, etc, and send the mail to these "real"
addresses. That should give them a little more work at sorting through the
chaff. I f there were say 5,000 accounts on each of the top ten free mail
sites receiving say 500 chaff letters every day for a month before
switching to new account names that would amount to about 25,000,000 mails
per day on accounts that would just disappear after awhile. Anyone know how
many anonymous remailers there are? I wonder if these bots could be thrown
in to help generate the cover traffic to boost anonymity with out sucking
up all the available bandwidth. 

It would seem that this would help address two problems. The problem of
insufficient cover traffic on the anonymous remailers and the issue of
keeping the jerks at the NSA so busy sniffing up junk that they become less
effective at snooping on legitimate communications.

Certainly the load of 5,000 bogus accounts on hotmail, which has reportedly
in excess of 20 million accounts, would be minimal.

I think the biggest issue is whether or not there are sufficient resources
to generate this volume of mail through a wide enough re-mailer base to
thwart filtering without identifying any particular group of people as the
originators of the letters.

I think a long term surge of 25 million letters per day which meet their
snoop standards would have to create some kind of a bogging effect on their
capacities. I don't know what the real numbers are but it might be
interesting if say 50 million or fewer total e-mails per day are "captured"
for storage by the spooks on a normal day. At that level a surge of 25
million per day would be a 50% increase for handling. What would be the
response of the NSA?

Some will say that it would be no big deal for the NSA since they could
just add more hardware. But I think that any time we can make the haystack
significantly bigger that should theoretically make the needle harder to
find. And since Cpunks aren't criminals we certainly wouldn't be creating
more needles!

APF