A Posteriori

First of all, I want to offer my sincere condolences to all freedom loving Europeans who just had the Orwellian Data Retention Act imposed upon them by the “democratic” European Union government.

While this development is indeed tragic, Europeans are not without recourse. Nonetheless, while a freedom lover’s first instinct to avoid data detection may be to encrypt all their communications, this would not be wise, or prudent, or effective. The use of encryption will raise a red flag to the Ministry of Love, or whatever they’ll call the department responsible for monitoring internet communications. That department will doubtless view the encrypted communication as an attempt to mask criminal activity, and act accordingly. Many countries, including the UK, make refusal to hand one’s encryption keys a jailable offence.

Instead, freedom lovers such as yourselves should employ a markedly different strategy. This strategy would be the exact opposite of that facilitated by encryption. Your goal should not be to reduce the amount of information logged about you. Your goal should be to drastically increase the amount of data logged about you. The more data the system must track the better. A freedom lover should not view the ubiquitousness of junk on the internet as a curse, but as a blessing.

Remember that there is only so much aggregate hard drive space in the world. The key vulnerability in the system is that there is they can’t write infinite logs for your internet habbits. Even if they manage to find enough hard drive space to log all this data, there is a limit to the extend to which they can index useful information in your logs, especially if there’s too much info in those logs for them to isolate the useful, pertinent information that they need in order to successfully blackmail, and thus, control you (the true purpose behind Data Retention).

Therefore, insofar as your recorded internet communications data is concerned, it should be your goal as a freedom lover to strive for a noise to signal ratio as close as possible to 100%. If you’re concerned that the Ministry of Love will frown upon you posting to an anti-war mailing list, then drown out the signal with subscriptions to multiple Gilmore Girls, Britanny Spears and Sponge Bob mailing lists, as well as multiple Canadian Antiques Roadshow and Desperate Housewives discussion forums. If you also subscribe to the Noam Chomsky newsletter and fear reprisals, then mask you anarchist sympathies with frequent automatic refreshes of the Star Wars, 24, and NYPD Blue home pages and latest news pages, as well as allowing each of your 100 alternative webmail addresses to be added to mailing lists of various spam sites, including, but not limited to, Bonzai Buddy, Gator and any site linked from any of the myriad of pop-up ads you see on a daily basis.

Remember that as far as you’re concerned, there isn’t nearly enough s&#^ on the entire internet to mask your true surfing habits. A Gmail account has 2 gigs for your emails. Use it all! Your ISP probably has either unlimited bandwidth or 20 Gb per month. Use it all! (yes, even if it’s unlimited). If your national government does not incur a 300 billion Euro deficit in the first year paying for all the bureaucrats to track, filter and categorize the sheer volume of junk you and your fellow internet users surf, subscribe to, or post, then you’re not doing your job as a freedom-loving patriot.

Fight data retention! Drown out the signal with noise! Overwhelm the infrastructure and government bureaucracy! Power to the people!