The Economics of Mass Surveillance and the Questionable Value of Anonymous Communications

We present a model of surveillance based on social network theory, where observing one participant also leaks some information about third parties. We examine how many nodes an adversary has to observe in order to extract information about the network, but also how the method for choosing these nodes (target selection) greatly influences the resulting intelligence. Our results provide important insights into the actual security of anonymous communication, and their ability to minimise surveillance and disruption in a social network. They also allow us to draw interesting policy conclusions from published interception figures, and get a better estimate of the amount of privacy invasion and the actual volume of surveillance taking place.