[SGVLUG] Internet privacy [was: Re: Need a quick debian or ubuntu test...]

[John E. Kreznar]

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In a posting purportedly from Charles Wyble <charles at thewybles.com>
but lacking a digital signature, it is written:

>> Sorry, I don't do casual surfing -- too much like breaking radio
>> silence.

> Huh? What on earth are you talking about? ...

> If your [sic] worried about breaking radio silence, then why do you
> ... use the internet at all?

Because actually, the Internet can be better at protecting privacy
than at destroying it.

Whatever goes out from a site onto the Internet is subject to being
copied to archives en route.  To thwart this privacy threat,
encryption and cover traffic can be used to be sure that what's
archived is useless.

Little goes out of this site except an encrypted message every 30
minutes mailed into a chain of random-latency, mixing, anonymizing
remailers based on mixmaster [1,2], and most of the important incoming
stuff is in Usenet newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages.

Each outgoing message is a live communication when one is available,
else a dummy message which is discarded by the last remailer in the
chain.  Live or dummy, all outgoing messages are indistinguishable
except with the decryption keys of the remailers in the chain.

Inbound, a full feed of alt.anonymous.messages is taken at all times
without interruption, with selection of wanted traffic only after it's
on site hidden from observers.

For example, to look at a web page, one of those live outgoing
messages could contain an instruction to an untraceable pseudonym on a
nymserver[3] somewhere to send a request for the page to a web-to-mail
server.  The nymserver encrypts the response to the nym's public key
and posts it on alt.anonymous,messages, from which it may be plucked
it when it appears.

Arrangements like these have been in daily use here for over ten years
now.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/mixmaster/.
[2] See usenet newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server.
[3] http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/nymserv

- -- 
 John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com 9F1148454619A5F08550 705961A47CC541AFEF13
   If George Orwell were alive now he would be astonished by the fact
   that the sort of surveillance he feared is supported not by a
   government imposing it from above on an unwilling population but by a
   groundswell of popular support.

   -- Victor Keegan, Guardian Unlimited, Thursday August 4, 2005
   <http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5254923-103572,00.html>

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