Humane Surveillance Working Group B. Shanks Request for Comments: 007 Category: Informational 1 April 2015 Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. Abstract To send a message to someone reading your private information without your knowledge, embed "DEAR WATCHERS your message" somewhere in your private information, replacing "your message" with your actual message. Table of Contents 1. Motivation 2. Requirements 3. Example 4. Details 5. Implementation 6. Security considerations 1. Overview Now that we live in a state of perpetual potential surveillance, it seems strange that there could be someone assigned to be watching you and yet you have no way to communicate with them directly. There could be some person part of whose job it is to get to know you (without you knowing), and yet you can't even say hello to them. This RFC aims to change that by providing an efficient method for direct, intentional, private one-way communication from you to your watcher(s). 2. Requirements * It should be possible to embed such a message within any plaintext. * The standard should not require the use of any non-alphanumeric ASCII characters. This allows the message to be embedded as a comment in almost any format that supports either comments or extension headers. This is why, for example, this RFC uses "DEAR WATCHERS" instead of "DEAR WATCHERS:" * It should not make reference to particular intelligence agencies, as this will change over time and space. * It should not be addressed only to 'intelligence agents', but more broadly to anyone looking at your stuff for any reason without your consent. * Without this protocol, you can already attempt to send a 'message' to watchers by embedding any sort of message that they would recognize as addressing them in a file or email that they are reading. The problem is that they might not be looking at that particular file or email. You cannot predict why your watcher is watching you, what they know about you, or what their procedures are, so you don't know which part of your data they are reading manually. The purpose of standardization is to increase the probability of effective communication from you to your watcher(s) by providing a standard, easy way for them to perform an automated search to look for messages from you to them within a large corpus of data collected from you. 3. Example DEAR WATCHERS i know that you know that i know that i am being watched. 4. Details "DEAR WATCHERS" SHOULD be in uppercase but MAY be in uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case. Each DEAR WATCHERS message MUST NOT span more than 3 LF (newline)-delimited lines, including the line containing DEAR WATCHERS. If a longer message is desired, please break it into multiple DEAR WATCHERS messages, ie repeat the DEAR WATCHERS header every 4 lines. The recipient MAY concatenate DEAR WATCHERS messages found on adjacent lines. A document containing the string "NO DEARWATCHERS HERE" means that this document does not contain any DEAR WATCHERS messages, even if it contains the string DEAR WATCHERS. This should be used in discussions about the DEAR WATCHERS protocol (such as this document) to prevent DEAR WATCHERS receiver clients from identifying such discussions as ersatz DEAR WATCHERS messages. DEAR WATCHERS senders MUST NOT send a DEAR WATCHERS message in any document containing the string "NO DEARWATCHERS HERE". DEAR WATCHERS receivers MAY ignore any instance of DEAR WATCHERS in any document that also contains the string "NO DEARWATCHERS HERE". DEAR WATCHERS messages themselves MUST NOT be placed in data intended to be public. However, the sender MAY make it publicly known that a certain private document contains a DEAR WATCHER message. Surveillance systems MUST NOT use the existence or content of DEAR WATCHERS messages to categorize data or senders. The creation of DEAR WATCHERS messages MUST NOT be automated. The existence of DEAR WATCHER messages MUST NOT be interpreted as implying any sort of consent to read anything, whether manually or automatically. DEAR WATCHERS messages MUST NOT be interpreted as giving consent to read any portion of the enclosing document. DEAR WATCHERS messages MUST NOT be interpreted as giving consent to learning of the existence of the enclosing document or any other metadata about it. DEAR WATCHERS messages MUST NOT be interpreted as giving consent to search your data for DEAR WATCHER messages, not even the document containing the message. A DEAR WATCHERS message MUST NOT be interpreted as giving consent to reading the DEAR WATCHER message itself, or to learn of its existence. Quite the opposite; a watcher can only read a DEAR WATCHER message AFTER they have violated your privacy to retrieve the message; and reading the DEAR WATCHER message is itself a further violation of privacy. The content of DEAR WATCHERS messages MUST NOT contain any sort of advertisement or unsolicited commercial communication. ANY recipient of a DEAR WATCHERS message MUST treat its existence and content as private. 5. Implementation On Unix systems, the command "grep -i -r -A 3 'DEAR WATCHERS' *" allows your watcher to view messages from you to them. This simple implementation does not support filtering by "NO DEARWATCHERS HERE". 6. Security Considerations Data containing the string "DEAR WATCHERS" for reasons other than this protocol may have a higher than usual probability of being surveilled. Correct implementation of this protocol has few security consequences, but incorrect implementations could create a host of dangers: 1. The recipient of a DEAR WATCHERS message might disclose the existence or content of the message to others. 2. Surveillance agencies may institute unknown procedures to automatically search for data containing DEAR WATCHERS, and treat this data and/or the persons sending it in an unknown, different manner. 3. If your watcher is themself being watched, then a private message from you to your watcher might be read by their watcher also. If you send a large amount of frivolous DEAR WATCHERS messages, you might get your watcher in trouble with their boss.