Brainstorm!

[maradydd]

Prompted by a discussion with bunnykitteh, who's good at prompting these kinds of things:

Imagine a Facebook and/or MySpace application aimed at organising flash mobs for political action (e.g., the kind of thing Anonymous might use to quickly notify members of imminent $cientology activity in a particular location). What features should it have? (Twitter gateway?)

(Note that with Facebook, especially, there are all kinds of interesting concerns with respect to privacy...)

Comments

[bigby.livejournal.com]

FlashMobs require people. one alternate is a twitter/*chan hybrid with no security other than everything being wide open. (remove the persistence of messages to prevent snooping?) Handshaking becomes a social and content function as does any persistent identity for Anon.

Maybe a two layer system where you can consume information with a nominal login if any (keeps you and your devise Anon and not identified for prosecution) and a posting layer with much higher security?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I can do sender/receiver unlinkability to twitter/*chan no problem. Cf. Matthias Bauer, "New Covert Channels in HTTP", WPES 2003. The more I think about it, the more I think that trusting the sender ends up being a social problem, but I'm going to keep chewing on it.

Also got pointed earlier today at Heydt-Benjamin/Serjantov/Defend, "Nonesuch: a Mix Network with Sender Unobservability", WPES 2006, which I need to read more thoroughly but also looks promising.