Peter writes:
I can't help myself.
So I see.
Actually, having access to such stats as amount
of power used, coke consumed, late-night pizzas
ordered from the Pentagon, or number of routine
status messages transmitted from ships of a specific
call sign, can reveal a surprising amount of detail.
Yes, but it does not necessarily reveal anything you wish to keep secret, and
even if it does, the traffic analysis required to recover the information may be
more costly than the information is worth.
It's fairly well known that the Americans had
broken the Japanese codes during World War II,
but it's less well known that this was not a one
shot break, but an ongoing process of breaks,
loss of capability and rebreaks.
So I suppose anyone planning to bomb Pearl Harbor should use NAT.
U.S. law enforcement was even using power consumption
(as measured by infrared detectors) as an indicator
of potential pot growing in your hydroponic basement
garden for a while.
They need to recalibrate their equipment. I don't have a garden. I don't even
have a basement.
This last one ran afoul of the illegal search
and seizure bits of the U.S. constitution but
The World Is A Very Big Place and not everybody
might be as picky as the U.S. on such things.
The U.S. is getting pretty fast and loose on the respect of these rights, too.
The moral of the story? Traffic patterns and metadata
can be powerful tools and one person's junk is
another person's data.
Sure ... but I really don't think that monitoring Coke machines or water meters
is likely to be a source of major security breaches. And for anyone who feels
otherwise, there are firewalls, proxies, NAT, and so on.
You should not assume that the majority of people
shouldn't or wouldn't care about it leaking out,
even if at first glance it seems pretty mundane.
I'm not merely assuming it, I'm certain of it. Anyone willing to put his
signature on a charge slip that contains all his credit-card information is not
likely to care about someone monitoring his water consumption, and certainly if
he does then he has some pretty skewed priorities.