I definitely wouldn’t try this at home
Richard M. Smith has a nifty (if risky) idea for finding out if Big Brother is reading your e-mail as it wends its merry way through the back alleys of the IntarWeb. The basic trick is to set up some new e-mail addresses, where one is inside the U.S. and one is outside the U.S., and then send e-mail between them that’s (a) likely to gain the (probably unwelcome) attention of the Feds and (b) contains a URL that said snoopers are going to want to follow. Create that URL on some web site where you have admin access, make sure it’s not accessible anywhere else, and the keep an eye on the access logs. If someone visits, it’s presumably because they’ve been reading your naughty e-mails.
It’s a pretty clever scheme and would probably work, but I can’t imagine actually doing it. Do I really need Dick Cheney’s buds coming ’round at teatime for a chat? I’m thinking my time would be better spent working for a change in the current paranoid political climate in the U.S. than tinkering around with this sort of stuff and inadvertently getting strip searched on my way to Germany as a result.
Props to Boing Boing via del.icio.us for the link.
Currently listening to: The amazing 7 CD + massive amounts of cool text Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton that my folks got me for Christmas. This is a truly monster piece of musicology - the kind of thing that ought to be on our coffee table if (a) we had one and (b) the cats wouldn’t sleep on it (or worse).
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