From Silicon Valley to the South Pacific, counter attacks to revelations of widespread National Security Agency surveillance are taking shape, from a surge of new encrypted email programs to technology that sprinkles the Internet with red flag terms to confuse would-be snoops.
Policy makers, privacy advocates and political leaders around the world have been outraged at the near weekly disclosures from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that expose sweeping US government surveillance programs.
"Until this summer, people didn't know anything about the NSA," said Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University co-director Amy Zegart. "Their own secrecy has come back to bite them."
Activists are fighting back with high-tech civil disobedience, entrepreneurs want to cash in on privacy concerns, Internet users want to keep snoops out of their computers and lawmakers want to establish stricter parameters.
Some of the tactics are more effective than others. For example, Flagger, a program that adds words like "blow up" and "pressure cooker" to web addresses that users visit, is probably more of a political statement than actually confounding intelligence agents.
Developer Jeff Lyon in Santa Clara, California, said he's delighted if it generates social awareness, and that 2,000 users have installed it to date. He said, "The goal here is to get a critical mass of people flooding the Internet with noise and make a statement of civil disobedience."
University of Auckland associate professor Gehan Gunasekara said he's received "overwhelming support" for his proposal to "lead the spooks in a merry dance," visiting radical websites, setting up multiple online identities and making up hypothetical "friends."
And "pretty soon everyone in New Zealand will have to be under surveillance," he said.
Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgens in San Francisco has a more direct strategy: by using encrypted email and browsers, he creates more smoke screens for the NSA.
"Encryption loses its' value as an indicator of possible malfeasance if everyone is using it," he said.
And there are now plenty of encryption programs, many new, and of varying quality.
"This whole field has been made exponentially more mainstream," said Cryptocat private instant messaging developer Nadim Kobeissi.
This week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University released a smartphone app called SafeSlinger they say encrypts text messages so they cannot be read by cell carriers, Internet providers, employers "or anyone else.
