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A Thought Experiment: Evading Echelon Through Peer-to-Peer

http://www.webreview.com/pi/2001/04_27_01a.shtml

April 27, 2001 > Platform Independent

A Thought Experiment: Evading Echelon Through Peer-to-Peer

By Andy Oram

This article first appeared in Internet Freedom.

As an adjunct to my article Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems: Caught Between EMI and Echelon, I propose a system here that could be used to hide communications—including the very fact that two or more people are communicating—from a massive surveillance network like Echelon.

Why would people want a system like this?

[...]

Now the Echelon-evasive system is complete. The two communicating sides must start by creating one-time pads that they agree on and share securely before illicit communication begins. This initial requirement may be complicated logistically, but except for the length of the shared information it is comparable to the problems presented by other forms of encryption.

After they separate, each sender uses the topmost key to name a single communication, and destroys it afterward. The recipient can query Freenet for the next available key at regular intervals or agreed-upon times.

Andy andyo@oreilly.com, is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates and moderator of the Cyber Rights mailing list for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. This article represents his views only.