[talk] a Guardian article

[Antti Kantee]

On 31/03/17 15:05, George Rosamond wrote:
>> Well, if the attack is the ISP looking at your traffic, generating a
>> profile, and selling that to advertisers (or who knows where), and fake
>> traffic is the countermeasure, then fake traffic should somehow prevent
>> the attack from happening.  In other words, the traffic should look like
>> a handful of people browsing, but be "all over the place" so as to
>> prevent profiling -- e.g. generate traffic both to fox news and msnbc
>> and also somewhere else for actual news.
>
> First, I'm not sure if generating fake traffic is necessarily the best
> mitigation to surveillance. It would need to be sufficiently randomized
> to not be clearly segmented as "fake".

I'd say it needs to be sufficiently *non*-randomized.  typo?

> It would seem the best countermeasure to ISP surveillance is using HTTPS
> for www browsing if you're concerned about content, although obviously
> the meta-data (source, destination, when, from where, etc) isn't hidden.
>
> If you're just looking at mitigating surveillance and your sole
> adversary is the ISP, then Tor for all TCP traffic makes sense,
> including IMAP and SSH. An alternative is certainly VPNs in this case,
> although then if you're using a provider, you're now concentrating all
> traffic you're attempting to hide with one choke-point.

End-to-end encryption where possible is of course a given, but in this 
case I'm not trying to hide who I am -- the ISP already knows where I 
live.  Like fake news is not about keeping things confidential -- 
something will leak anyway -- neither is fake traffic.  It's about 
giving the adversary much to choose from, in which case they tend to 
choose whatever suits their purposes.