So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.
Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.
Thoughts?
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.
Sounds like a job for little Bobby Tables…
Back in the days when hotels were first switching to electronic door locks, I read about a group of competer guys at a major trade show in Las Vegas who decided to push the limits of the system. Hundreds of them synchronized their watches and all tried to enter their room at the same time. They crashed the system.
If a few million people started adding certain key words and phrases to their emails and posts, perhaps we can also crash the system.
Liberty. Tea Party. Declaration of Independence. Constitution. Lamp post. Rope. Tar and feathers. Run out of town on a rail. F**k you NSA.
The list should include kill the president and bomb the NSA as well as many other such terms.
Shouldn’t such words be in Arabic or Arabish?
No, they’re not interested in that. They only want to profile people who care about the Constitution, or liberty.
Simon Jester? The “nonsense” shell of the key words should be limericks and doggerel such that if exposed the snoops are the humorless party.
“When one man says, ‘No!’ all Rome trembles!”–Spartacus in the movie of the same name. (The quote is even more effective if you say it while doing a Kirk Douglas impression.)
[And socialists, don’t waste your time. Every time I quote that line some stupid leftist will show up and say, ‘Hey, didja know that line was written by a socialist?* Didja, hah, didja didja?” Yes, I do know. In fact, I enjoy the irony that what was apparently intended as some kind of socialist agitprop actually has a very libertarian theme.]
*Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo from a novel by Howard Fast.
<a href="http://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2013/06/11/trollin-nsa/" Not an entirely new idea…
Sorry. The html worked in the preview pane.
http://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2013/06/11/trollin-nsa/
Alternatively, the reverse of this might be useful. In Larry Niven’s near-to-medium future works (think about now to 2300AD or so, with some faster tech developments and one or two that haven’t even started yet) the ARM, which is the enforcement arm of the UN, has clamped down hard on tech development and monitors just about everything for suspicious words and phrases. Just as the NSA is alleged to be doing now.
Their solution to the problem is to discuss matters of possible interest to them using ellipsis and allusion. As an example, a couple of people discussing the possibility of doing something about hostile aliens that have invaded Sol system refer to “cutting the bread with the motor” which is actually about attacking Kzinti ships with the drive exhaust of their ships. Which is actually a BIG laser.
Hey! Maybe we can actually make use of all those “liberal” arts grads and poets. Oh wait…
You call it ellipsis and allusion, I call it code. The NSA was established as a codebreaking agency.
Waffen SS show up at Rand’s when commenter talks about killing the president. News at 11.
Based on some of the spam I deal with regularly, software to embed key phrases in mangled near english already exists. An algorithm for generating mangled text like I’m seeing is in a programming textbook I have from near 20 years back. Given writing from a specific author as source material, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the snoop monitor computers thought it was more from the same author.