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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-to-be-ashamed-of dept.

Wired:

A woman at a gym tells her friend she pays rent higher than $2,000 a month. An ex-Microsoft employee describes his work as an artist to a woman he's interviewing to be his assistant—he makes paintings and body casts, as well as something to do with infrared light that's hard to discern from his foreign accent. Another man describes his gay lover's unusual sexual fetish, which involves engaging in fake fistfights, "like we were doing a scene from Batman Returns."

These conversations—apparently real ones, whose participants had no knowledge an eavesdropper might be listening—were recorded and published by the NSA. Well, actually no, not the NSA, but an anonymous group of anti-NSA protestors claiming to be contractors of the intelligence agency and launching a new "pilot program" in New York City on its behalf. That spoof of a pilot program, as the prankster provocateurs describe and document it in videos on their website, involves planting micro-cassette recorders under tables and benches around New York city, retrieving the tapes and embedding the resulting audio on their website: Wearealwayslistening.com.

Could actions like these, while they will surely be dismissed as childish stunts by some, succeed at driving home the real impact of NSA spying to the general public in a way that hasn't been managed yet?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:55AM

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:55AM (#185906) Journal

    The best way to make the sheeples see how things impact them is to show them how things impact them. All to often it seems that the folks that should be getting outraged aren't because they cannot process or imagine how it will afect THEM as individuals.

    "I don't have any secrets... why do I care if the [insert name] is recording/monitoring/whatever my phone calls". Oh what's that Chelsea-Child-Protector? You do suddenly care if someone records your private conversation with Gladice-Gossip-Girl about how you pulled a muscle doing what with WHO?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:29AM

    by Nuke (3162) on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:29AM (#185979)
    Fluffeh wrote :-

    The best way to make the sheeples see how things impact them is to show them how things impact them.

    Doesn't work like that. A prank like this simply becomes an issue in its own "right", and any supposed connection with the NSA is lost on people. These guys are jokers who are offering a tongue in cheek "excuse" for their prank. They are like the vandal who burns down a forest and when caught says it was to "give the fire brigade an exercise".

  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:20PM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:20PM (#186101) Journal

    Won't work because the majority think they are special snowflakes and it will NEVER happen to them, nosireebob. I mean how many years has it been common knowledge that most are broadcasting their porn habits to the world [vice.com] but you haven't seen a mass outcry for Google and all these dataminers to knock that shit off, have you?

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.