

PRISM: an idea for fighting back - bufferout

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&#x27;t have privacy, I don&#x27;t see why they should.
======
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.

------
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.

