Source: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8566263&cid=51235633
The goal is to make the data less useful and harder to tie to an individual or separate from fake data, and to increase the cost of collecting and storing such data.
Here is a new form, the same as the fighting spam one with minor changes. Feel free to use it as most of the measures proposed to fight surveillance fail for the same reasons.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting surveillance. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws not included here)
(X) Governments can easily use it to identify dissidents
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop surveillance for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(X) Users will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from everyone
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Governments don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for communication
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
(X) Ease of searching all text based communication
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in current solutions
( ) Susceptibility of other forms of encryption
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all surveillance approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of surveillance
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people
( ) Dishonesty on the part of everyone themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Encryption should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Speech should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government decrypting my stuff
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!