Steve Smith creates a thought experiment for you to think about, one that would render all data collection methods against metadata useful, and protect communications of everyone online by making the process of decoding all messages harder by protecting past and future communications.
Episode #5-42 released on July 7, 2015
NSA, CSIS, and other government groups have decided to violate every single persons right to privacy, and the only way we can win, is by making life and work extremely hard and next to impossible to achieve by doing something most governments would never expect from the common user, only we need to all do it, all the time, at the same time.
Keep in mind, this implies that we protect our identities online by literally overlapping technologies designed to make it harder and harder track users' activities online. Keeping in mind, that these technologies work best when everyone uses them, utterly blinding all tracks of the true path of data online.
Hiding where data is going and encrypting all the contents does something to data that most don't think about, it makes the metadata useless. Metadata is the key component of tracking that most governments want, and not necessarily the message inside. It is the key to knowing who you communicate with online, and where to hang out on the Internet.
If any government cannot reliably attach metadata to a person, they are forced to decode the content. In this case, they will have dedicate massive amounts of resources to decrypting data online, which for the most part, private key based.
Private Key encryption methods rely on a set of private keys that are never shared. Because the owners of these keys are the only ones who can decode the messages, and the government may not know where the data originated from, they cannot identity who to serve a warrant for the private key.
Furthermore, there has been talk of making private key technology capable of rotating, allowing each new day to have its own new set of keys. This would mean that the current key cannot decode past messages, meaning that all previous communication and all further communication is protected. If every server only were to change to this paradigm, no longer would there be an issue with the privacy of communication.
But, the metadata, still exists, and we need to deal with it. And, a logic from some films can be applied here. Combine two technologies, VPNs and TOR. It is even possible to connect from one VPN node to another. By bouncing our public Internet endpoints to another geographical location, we eliminate geographical tracking. By encrypting the communications, we hide the messages, but encasing our signals in tunnels, we hide the data, and by using services like Tor, we can, also, hide the path of data. But, we can only achieve this if everyone online does so at the same time.
There is an issue though. One most people don't think about, your browser. We need to use clean browsers with no existing cookies or super cookies in any part of our experience, including Flash, Java, etc... If we use clean browsers to access the Internet, browsers that emit no unique variables that can be hashed into a unique browser fingerprint, we cannot be uniquely identified, and if the server cannot identify us, we cannot be betrayed by the whole experiment.
Basically, in short, we need to tunnel to other servers around the world, and bounce our connections around the world using services like TOR, use encryption to hide our messages, while the conduits hide our metadata, and access servers that use a new private key issued each and every single day, hiding and protecting all past and future communications from being cracked. And, for this to work, the number of people using this method should be as high as possible. We can roughly estimate that out of the 7 billion people on Earth, 2 billion of them have access to the Internet, precisely the number we need to blind every government in one mighty blow for privacy, 100% or none at all. This is precisely how important privacy should be for You.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions