Monkeywrenching the spooks
In days of yore, geeks who wanted to show off their bad attitudes would include an X-NSA-Fodder mail-header in their email, including things like “mossad terrorism CIA cocaine bomb.” The nominal premise was that if everyone did it, it would be impossible to usefully automatically filter email, so the Three Letter Agencies would be forced to give up. But I don’t think anyone really believed that the TLAs had any interest in their email, nor that anyone would seriously suggest there was any actual value in extending bait so explicitly marked.
Nonetheless, this has been updated and carried to an absurd degree: the Supervillianizer conspiracy client allows you to create a villain with a Swiss email address, who then automatically exchanges email with other villains and together they form conspiracy networks
Swiss law requires ISPs to store all email for 6 months, and I think we all think the Three Letter Agencies and police have an interest in reading email today.
That is just one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. On the other hand, this seems like a bad time to implement it. It's one thing to keep the TLA's busy chasing spurious data when the threats are more in their imagination than real. But now that there are actual terrorists planning attacks on the Western world, I think it may be counter-productive to flood the mailboxes of the people whose job it is to detect and prevent such attacks. On the gripping hand, the amount of false data generated by a project like this is probably quite small compared to the amount of noise that the TLA's would pick up anyway. My final answer: mostly harmless.
Posted by Jimcat on July 21 2003 05:23