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PRISM: an idea for fighting back

1 points by bufferout ↗ HN
Create a web service that provides 1px tracking gifs that webmasters can voluntarily embed in their pages. Said service has a community maintained list of ip blocks belonging to pro-surveillance organisations e.g. congress, intelligence orgs, military, contractors, general gov, etc. Any time the tracking image is requested by someone with a matching ip, automatically publish details of that request (referring page, ip, time, etc) to a public repository. If we can't have privacy, I don't see why they should.

4 comments

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detcader
Interesting, except surveillance doesn't usually involve pageloads. Look at Lavabit -- how would this have helped in their case?
bufferout
The idea is to expose the browsing habits of the watchers. e.g. Oh look, someone in the judicial branch just visited a page on cross-dressing.
pedalpete
I'm not sure this idea would have the effect you're looking for. The 'watchers' as you referred to them in a comment, probably don't care that you or anybody knows that they're watching. We already know, or at this point assume they are. Beyond that, how would you be gathering the IP addresses used?I assume that what they are running is little more than clever bots which can scrape data and get past most site security. It isn't an actual person going through every page on the internet. They're storing mass amounts of data to do analysis on at a later time.

Basically, the most important things like your Facebook, GMail, mobile and Twitter data are already being gathered. If you saw a little pixel image saying "somebody is capturing your data", would you stop using these services? If not, you're not really having much effect, I don't think.

bufferout
I don't think I've done a very good job of explaining this.

The people within these organisations also browse the web: what I'm proposing is that we publish the details of what they're browsing. For example, if a site such as torrentfreak decided to embed the tracking gif, I for one would find it very interesting to see what gov departments are reading which articles on that site.