In a certain grimly satisfied way, I've been pleased to notice the level of indignation resulting from President Bush's acknowledgement that he broke the law by ordering surveillance of Americans without warrants. It's about damned time people woke up to the reality of abuse of power.
Many have noted their doubts that the Bush administration will ever peacefully leave office, due to members of the administration having committed so many crimes that they don't dare abandon power for fear of the indictments to follow.
Bearing that in mind, as well as the lack of remorse exhibited by the President when he incorrigibly stated his intention to continue defying the law, I believe that a broad change of outlook on the part of the American people, or such among them as value freedom anyway, is perhaps in order.
Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, independents and even you oh-so-rare principled conservatives who haven't drank the Bush Kool-Aid, if there are any of you left...
Stop seeing yourselves as political reformers and instead understand that you are now in the early days of a resistance movement. This is not what you or I have chosen. It is the burden that history has forced upon whoever has sufficient conscience to accept it.
As George W. Bush has thumbed his nose at you with impunity and said that his program of illegal, warrantless surveillance will continue unabated, it behooves us all to consider not merely what steps can be taken to appeal to the political establishment for redress of this grievance, but to frustrate and obstruct this illegal surveillance to whatever degree you legally can.
For now, there is a perfectly legal but underutilized way to frustrate and obstruct it -- strong cryptography software.
I'm going to direct you toward some freely available strong crypto software in a moment, but let me put the rest of the idea for this anti-surveillance campaign before you first.
I offer as a name for the campaign, "Surveil This!"
As I envision it, participants would, at least once a week or so, send at least one strongly encrypted e-mail to one or more buddies. It could contain anything -- your grocery list, a nursery rhyme, pictures of your cat or any of those stupid jokes that are always going around.
The NSA can presumably crack this encryption. That's not the point. With enough people sending enough encrypted emails, decrypting everything will eventually use so much in the way of computer resources, time and money as to make the program untenable. It will eventually have to be abandoned and even persons within the NSA will presumably urge the administration to do so. Furthermore, as the frustration and paranoia of political leaders increases, they become more likely to make stupid mistakes that will get them removed from office.
Suggested additional steps...
Artists: Come up with with a selection of logo images for campaign participants to choose from.
Everyone: Display the logo for the project on your blog or personal home page (if you have one).
Webmasters: Somebody please set up a small informational site for the campaign if there's interest. I actually build web sites myself, but I honestly don't think I can realistically take on the burden of running yet another one.
Everyone: Link the "Surveil This!" logo on your blog or personal home page to whatever site that a consensus determines ought to be the main informational site for the campaign.
Everyone: Even if you don't have a blog or personal home page that you can put logos and links on, you can still help publicize the campaign via email and postings on community sites.
Techies: If an informational site gets put up with discussion forums, consider volunteering to help with user support.
With regard to software, the more computer savvy among you probably already know what crypto software I've had in mind. There are both freeware and commercial versions of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) available for Windows and other platforms. Linux and Mac users can use a roughly equivalent program called GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard).
With PGP/GnuPG, users set up a matched pair of crypto keys -- one public and one private. You publish your public key so that people who want to send you an encrypted message can use it to encrypt those messages. Through the sublime mysteries of higher mathematics, messages encrypted with your public key can realistically only be decrypted using your private key. While the NSA could presumably "brute force" any one message -- they couldn't do all of them if this becomes a widespread grassroots effort. It would require to much computing power.
Is there interest? Who else, if anybody, would stand with me on this?
Cross-posted at my blog.