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

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Hmm..I think the primary need would be have some means of preventing the flashmob from being hijacked or monitored by the authorities. This has happened at least once to my knowledge. There was protest about Tibet in London recently that the police 'jacked and changed the route so the protesters marched into a trap.

Which, upon reflection, seems to be about 80% social engineering and less network security. The problem is, how do you identify who's a legitimate user?

[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.