[dave at farber.net: [IP] more on AP Story Justice Dept. Probing Domestic Spyin

[Tyler Durden]

John Young wrote...

>Beyond orders to gather information on US citizens there is the
>question of what was done to mine long-stored raw data which
>has presumably been filtered. Recall NSA policy to never discard
>any encrypted material gathered, none, forever. It is likely there
>is voluminous material on US citizens stored and ready for
>reassessment as needs be.
>
>There have been numerous revelations of other countries storing
>such data for decades,

Seems to me there should be a nice workaround for this, crypto-wise. Again, 
sorry if this is well-known. No time to keep up these days.

BUT, encrypted messages should have something like an expiring one-off time 
stamp. It could work like this:

Message is encrypted and broken into 2 or more pieces. Neither piece is 
sufficient to reconstruct the message. Piece one is sent as the "message" 
(or maybe the message is merely a pointer to the various encrypted pieces). 
Message 2 is stored somewhere in a Tor-based repository (ie, the actual 
address is unknown). The key includes encrypted instructions on where to 
obtain the other half as well as deencrypting the message.

If the message is not de-encrypted with X days, the stored piece(s) is\are 
destroyed.

Of course, NSA will likely grab&store the hidden piece as well, but I submit 
one might be able to make this a fairly intractable problem, particularly if 
information about -where- the appropriate piece is stored is itself 
destroyed. (ie, they may have the piece, but they dont know which message it 
belongs).

-TD