NZ Professor Advocates Civil Disobedience Against Mass Surveillance 321
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."
I've my own approach. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Make it easy. (Score:5, Informative)
Start with trackmenot [nyu.edu] and go from there.
Re:Need to Do More (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget to download the US Army publication (available many places online, in various formats) :
"TM 31-210: Improvised Munitions Handbook".
I was issued this TM (Technical Manual) when I was in the US Army in 1977. Instant science geek Massive Woody! The actual printed manual even had many blank pages, with a note at the beginning of the book on how to construct an effective, simple balance scale, and the info that each page of the book weighed one gram!
After the intro of the 'MacGyver' TV series, it became 'the MacGyver Bible' by the troops.
I highly recommend the book for the potentially useful info, and the entertainment value.
DISCLAIMER:
Most of the recipes/procedures are dangerous and risky!
Keep in mind the context of this manual. Alarmingly, the context is for a would be terrorist, guerrilla fighter, insurgent, etc.....go figure...
Re:Need to Do More URL (Score:3, Informative)
http://ia601203.us.archive.org/5/items/milmanual-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook/tm_31-210_improvised_munitions_handbook.pdf
happy instant woody ;)
Re:Need to Do More (Score:5, Informative)
I hate organized media organizations for the travesty that they have become to unbiased reporting but my personal experience with the Occupy protests were that they were spot-the-fuck on. Also, in each of the three that I traveled hundreds of miles to go to, the police didn't stamp out shit...they showed up in strength but they didn't bother me or anyone I knew of who wasn't purposely trying to cause problems. Again, I'm not fond of the establishment but I was fairly impressed at the restraint shown by the 'peace-keepers'.
Things may be different in NYC; however, in other parts of the country, at least in the two cities I visited during the Occupy protests, there was local and national media coverage all over the place and things were as fair as could be expected.
Re:Need to Do More (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget to download the US Army publication (available many places online, in various formats) :
"TM 31-210: Improvised Munitions Handbook".
I was issued this TM (Technical Manual) when I was in the US Army in 1977. Instant science geek Massive Woody! The actual printed manual even had many blank pages, with a note at the beginning of the book on how to construct an effective, simple balance scale, and the info that each page of the book weighed one gram!
After the intro of the 'MacGyver' TV series, it became 'the MacGyver Bible' by the troops.
I highly recommend the book for the potentially useful info, and the entertainment value.
DISCLAIMER:
Most of the recipes/procedures are dangerous and risky!
Keep in mind the context of this manual. Alarmingly, the context is for a would be terrorist, guerrilla fighter, insurgent, etc.....go figure...
https://archive.org/details/milmanual-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook [archive.org]
Re:Need to Do More (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why you're surprised by that ... the US has funded insurgencies against governments they don't like for decades.
A lot of nasty, vicious people were funded because they were opposed to the Soviets. In fact, Bin Laden and many of the people in Afghanistan were funded by the US.
The US used to fund what they'd now class as terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments they didn't like the ideology of -- which in no small part is why there's a lot of resentment in Latin America against the US.
Don't act like the last decade or so has been in a vacuum. These types of groups were actively (and sometimes secretly) funded and trained over a large number of years, and often some of the more appalling things they did were overlooked because of Cold War ideology.
That the US literally wrote the book on how to do this is of no surprise to anybody else. If you train attack dogs, you better be damned sure you can control them or they'll turn on you.
Re:You first! (Score:2, Informative)
Tell that to Steward Rhodes and Dan Johnson.