That’s some heady work for a mere 50 pages. It attempts to address why obfuscation is needed, whether obfuscation is ethically justified, and whether it can work. Having familiarized readers with obfuscation as a concept, Part II argues for the value of the technique. More mundanely, some groups of consumers swap store loyalty cards to be able to get discounts while disguising their personal purchasing patterns. A technology-based example given in the book is the swapping of cellphone SIM cards by terrorist operatives to thwart metadata surveillance and, ultimately, drone strikes. Other obfuscation strategies involve genuine but misleading signals, such as the identical bowler hats of thieving confederates in The Thomas Crown Affair. TrackMeNot, for example, is a tool for online obfuscation that Nissenbaum and others developed to disguise a user’s online search queries by automatically generating a flood of fake queries. Other examples are more in keeping with the book’s theme of obfuscation as the tool of the oppressed, not the oppressor. The authors discuss how, after irregularities in the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, Russian government allies used Twitter bots to disrupt online protests by flooding protest hashtags with pro-Russia or nonsense messages. Like chaff, one strategy for obfuscation is to produce fake signals to hide the real signal. First up: paper and foil chaff deployed by warplanes to create decoy signals and confuse radar systems. The book isn’t intended to be a taxonomy of obfuscation, but the examples offered provide insight into a range of strategies.
Part I of this small-format book introduces obfuscation’s key characteristics and variations through examples. They aim to start a limited revolution of the informationally unempowered by offering tools to bolster privacy, to make things marginally harder for an adversary, or even just to protest data collection. They argue that the average user of technology should obfuscate-that is, deliberately add ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection. But in Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, professors at New York University, make the case for hiding the truth. In an age of “fake news,” spam Twitter accounts, and sham Facebook groups, there is already plenty of concealment and disinformation to go around. Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest
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