There's now precedent to suggest that providing FISA-ordered data in a
deliberately inconvenient format can be considered contempt of court.
The case establishing it? Lavabit printing out their server TLS keys in
small font. That's not even such a big deal, because OCR could still be
used trivially if the opponents weren't tech-illiterate. Depending on
the type of key, you could probably even detect OCR errors quickly by
checking for primality or group-compatibility for the key subunits.

So that's even less technically troublesome than what you're suggesting,
and it was contempt. I don't think the telecoms would get away with it,
even if they did care a damn about customers.

On 14/05/14 06:11, jim bell wrote:
> Alright, what I meant was this:  The judge ordered that the information be 
> provided in electronically-readable form.  He meant, "not on paper", because 
> if it were on paper, that would be very difficult to actually USE.  My idea 
> was to put the information onto pdf files, where if you view the pdf file, it 
> would look like lines of "captcha"-type data:  Weird, warped characters, in 
> various odd colors, overlapping lines, etc.   CAPTCHA - Wikipedia, the free 
> encyclopedia    Specifically designed to NOT be computer-identifiable.  The 
> essence of the presentation of the data would be that it wouldn't be readable 
> by 'computer' at all; it would have to be decoded by human 
> intervention...even though it was in "electronically-readable form"!!
>                
>  
>    CAPTCHA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> A CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell 
> Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-respons...  
> View on en.wikipedia.org Preview by Yahoo  
>         Jim Bell
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
>  From: John Young <[email protected]>
> To: jim bell <[email protected]>; cpunks <[email protected]> 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 5:51 PM
> Subject: Re:  "SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (li terally!)"
>  
> 
> 
> There is a good chance the documents are covertly marked as
> you suggest, the ostentatious classification markings a ruse for
> untutored yokels to fancy are genuine. 
> 
> Covert markings have been in use for a long time, as well as 
> ostentatious markings. On paper as well as digital and other
> forms of electronic.
> 
> And certainly packets carry unique markings in a variety of
> overt and covert types.
> 
> Some of the techniques fall under the inadvertent emanations 
> rubric associated with Tempest -- which has blossomed well 
> beyond the FOIA releases from the late 1990s. TSCM is a 
> marvel of duplicity and ruse.
> 
> At 08:16 PM 5/13/2014, you wrote:
> 
> From: Black
> Fox <[email protected]>
>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 2:58 PM, coderman
> <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:00 AM, John Young
> <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>>>> We've seen the Greenwald book No Place to Hide, where are
> the
>>>>> promised gush of Snowden documents available? His
> publisher
>>>>> doesn't show a source. Surely not another marketing
> tease.
>>>> great question; let us know if you find them!
>>> http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf 
>>
>> If I were the telephone company from which the records were requested,
> I'd note that the records were requested in "electronic"
> format.  Then, I'd ask a programmer to write a program to write a
> program to generate pdf files with embedded "captcha"-type
> text:  Images that are quite apparent to the human eye, but are very
> difficult for any computer to make any sense of.   All the
> phone records would be there (in no particular order), and they'd all be
> very readable to humans, but...
>>               
> Jim Bell
>>
>>

-- 
T: @onetruecathal, @IndieBBDNA
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