Bomb minuteman prepper NSA succession airport gun tea party Anonymous TOR Snowden steganography top secret

George emails:

Tried to reply to your post on the NSA today. OpenID isn't feeling it.

The only solution that I can think of is to overwhelm the system with false positives.  If enough people are sending enough encrypted data to enough places, then the data itself becomes unreliable.  We need to get the signal to noise ratio higher.

Only question…how many participants would you need to make it impractical to investigate (and prosecute for annoying the government?)  10,000?  100,000? More?

Short answer: I don't know, but maybe we're fixin' to find out.

Longer answer: in security parlance, a "false positive" result is where a system flags something as being suspicious or malicious when it really isn't.  The best example of this is when Senator Kennedy found himself on the No Fly list because the No Fly list is stupid (at least in how it works).

There is also a "False Negative" result, where the system misses actual threats.  9/11 is a great example, where clear jihadists were taking flying lessons without much concern over how to land the plane.

Pre 9/11, the Fed.Gov was tuned to minimize False Positives even at the expense of allowing False Negatives.  Post 9/11 the aversion for False Negatives has been dialed up to 11, with a corresponding skyrocketing of False Positives.

Naturally, this tends to annoy the people subjected to False Positive results.  People like, err, me.

And so, since the system is likely designed and administered by incompetents, it is presumed to be trivial to monkeywrench the system.  From a practical sense, it aims to make the NSA's strongest competence (automated computer analysis of metadata) irrelevant (or even a weakness) by flagging so many clearly innocuous items as False Positive that the cost of manual follow up becomes prohibitive, and the system gets turned off.

It gets even more expensive if the people engaging in monkeywrenching include interesting data, like this picture of Crash the Wondercat that includes a super top secret message (well, top secret in Borepatch land, anyway).  Spend some time decoding that, Mr. NSA drone!

Because at the end of the day, the Fed.Gov will only do this if it pays.  If we make it too expensive to work, they won't do it.

Bootnote to the NSA: this post is protected by the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Emphasis mine.  Note that it is not a crime to make your job harder, and even if it were a crime to do so that  law is clearly unconstitutional per the above.  Putting it in terms that LBJ used, it's better for you to have Internet Security guys like me inside the tent p***ing out rather than outside the tent p***ing in.

Actually a pretty good description of the problem of false positive and false negative, right there.