Forced Exposure

Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already…

Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen.

('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad."

I've taught more people about the Web Of Trust and how to use GPG in the last ~1.5 months than in the last ~1.5 decades.

"...and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be."

Something about this current drama has made the whole concept of encryption and the realities of surveillance suddenly resonate with a LOT more people. It's not a majority yet, of course, but a change in perception this dramatic is a amazing.

"We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.'"

I have people emailing me encrypted email now, who just last year ignored the idea with the usual dismissal of it being "unnecessary" or "too complicated"[1].

"Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you riot. I don't want to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell your to write."

So now that people are finally noticing the reality they live in, and are finally getting mad, I see this as what educators call a "teachable moment" to try and suggest a few broader concepts tan the gpg lessons they are asking for.

"I'm as MAD AS HELL, and I'm NOT going to take this anymore!"

A few things I've been trying to teach recently, now that there are actually people listening:

* General education on the concept of data mining, and the power of a handful of JOIN clauses. The idea of grabbing all your phone calls is something most people already understand. Connecting a few random bits of entropy together to get a surprisingly reliable primary key is still not widely understood.

* Web Of Trust - Starting small and local is good, just like in elections. It would be amazing if somehow the Key Signing Party could be worked into some traditional social ritual.

* Stop supporting the feudal model of email, by tying your identity to an @company.com domain. Land is king IRL, and staking your claim on the internet is important for similar reasons. It would be nice if everybody could change their MX records and hosting service as easily as they change POTS long distance providers.

* Stop using webmail - many of the benefits of encryption are lost if you don't keep the keys in your physical possession, as demonstrated by lavabit and elsewhere.

This doesn't directly fix the problem[2], but it is stuff that can be done (and is being done) now, and these are certainly things that would help immediate problems faced when organizing a revolution. The NSA doesn't have the manpower or money to strong-arm their snooping routers into every last-mile endpoint. This kind of long-term cutting of the data the NSA can see is one of the better weapons we have against them.

"Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell..."[3]

[1] You would think a Biology professor would understand an argument about how this isn't necessary about them, but about maintaining the "herd immunity" of the email ecosystem...

[2]: It might in the long run, once a lot more software support is written, and it finally becomes possible for regular people to extend their web of trust as far as, e.g. groklaw.

[3]: Incidentally, the lecture at the end of Network comes to mind every time the government panics about Snowden: "...and YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WIIL...ATONE!"

edit; formatting

> I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.

Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam.

(And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from leaking, then subsets of the actual data will leak as well. Five or ten years from know, you'll have a huge grey market of -- medium to low quality, outdated, etc. -- surveillance data.)

...Can PJ not figure out GnuPG? Is she officially retiring from any and all digital correspondence contrary to her notice that "[her] email [addresses] still work"? She says she's getting off the internet to whatever extent possible, and then asks people to continue to send her mail. I also find it cute that people believe facilities based in other Western nations are outside of the NSA's reach.

I gotta say that stopping Groklaw, which is a public site anyway, because someone else might be reading it, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, despite the emotional ploys in this article. She can write and save drafts locally in a (GASP) local word processor and encrypt anything she chooses to upload to remote storage. The government will then not be able to read unfinished Groklaw articles. Does this resolve the issue?

This whole article should've just been a public key and a PO box address with this note: "I will not acknowledge plaintext mail. If you are uncomfortable transmitting encrypted data over the wire, please send a USB disk to this box."

There is also https://mykolab.com that PJ now uses:

If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US.