Brunton Finn, Nissenbaum Helen. Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

Massachusetts, Press Cambridge, 2015. — 107 p. — ISBN: 0262029731, 978-0-262-33132-6With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance. C the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage . C especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it. Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users' search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.An Obfuscation Vocabulary
Core Cases
Chaff: defeating military radar
Twitter bots: filling a channel with noise
CacheCloak: location services without location tracking
TrackMeNot: blending genuine and artificial search queries
Uploads to leak sites: burying significant files
False tells: making patterns to trick a trained observer
Group identity: many people under one name
Identical confederates and objects: many people in one outfit
Excessive documentation: making analysis inefficient
Shuffling SIM cards: rendering mobile targeting uncertain
Tor relays: requests on behalf of others that conceal personal traffic
Babble tapes: hiding speech in speech
Operation Vula: obfuscation in the struggle against Apartheid
Other Examples
Orb-weaving spiders: obfuscating animals
False orders: using obfuscation to attack rival businesses
French decoy radar emplacements: defeating radar detectors
AdNauseam: clicking all the ads
AdNauseam: clicking all the ads
Quote stuffing: confusing algorithmic trading strategies
Swapping loyalty cards to interfere with analysis of shopping patterns
BitTorrent Hydra: using fake requests to deter collection of addresses
Deliberately vague language: obfuscating agency
Obfuscation of anonymous text: stopping stylometric analysis
Code obfuscation: baffling humans but not machines
Personal disinformation: strategies for individual disappearance
Apple’s “cloning service” patent: polluting electronic profiling
Vortex: cookie obfuscation as game and marketplace
“Bayesian flooding” and “unselling” the value of online identity
FaceCloak: concealing the work of concealment
Obfuscated likefarming: concealing indications of manipulation
URME surveillance: “identity prosthetics” expressing protest
Manufacturing conflicting evidence: confounding investigation
II Understanding Obfuscation
Why Is Obfuscation Necessary?
Obfuscation in brief
Understanding information asymmetry: knowledge and power
The fantasy of opting out
Weapons of the weak: what obfuscation can do
Distinguishing obfuscation from strong privacy systems
Obfuscation Justified?
Ethics of obfuscation
From ethics to politics
Will Obfuscation Work?
Obfuscation is about goals: want to use obfuscation …, Is my obfuscation project …