One man’s dissident

As more and more data flows across the internet in the form of photographs and small text messages like twitter and SMS it becomes much easier for the bad guys to hide information among all this which makes the security services job all but impossible. They are mainly relegated to sifting data after the event to make a nice report for the enquiry. Of course they also build cases out of nothing for someone arrested on suspicion because they view specific websites or have copies of the Anarchists Cookbook on their PCs.

I often smile at the hypocrisy of our government. On one hand they arrest their own citizens for having a video of making a car bomb and some fertiliser in their garden whilst they criticise China for stopping people accessing that same video and encourage our technical people to design systems to bypass their censorship. All, of course, while the last bastion of freedom to fall, it fell this year, installs a kill switch for the internet.

One mans dissident is another mans freedom fighter. Nelson Mandela, the IRA, the Dalai Lama and many others will tell you that the pen is not mightier than the sword. It takes action and dedication.

So for dissidents the world over. Another tool in your toolkit, this one uses twitter and Flickr to allow you to pass messages, and I’d much rather use steganography than encryption in the UK. Keys can be a liability in an oppressive country.