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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?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday May 21 2015, @06:24AM
Because the NSA is on a giant and sustained fishing expedition. Just because they're not currently relevant doesn't mean they won't be recorded and potentially listened to for amusement and perhaps even used unofficially for more harmful purposes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @06:43AM
People"s perversions and life struggles don't make them terrorists.
And how, pray tell, could you know this? Unless you are, in fact, either a terrorist your self, or a NSA analyst (although, just typing NSA analyst makes me laugh!). We live in a world where any suburban youth can be recruited by radical ideas, mostly because we cannot understand what these kids these days are thinking. Time was, back in the day, that most of them would just drift off to utopian communes in search of sex, drugs, and macrobiotics. But things are different now. They have put something in the water. The NSA calls it "omega prime jihad wannabe". So we have to listen in to every conversation, no matter how inane, how pedestrian, how stupid even on the level of a Soylent News Micro$oft shill, because they could be the next Justin Beiber. Seriously.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fauxlosopher on Thursday May 21 2015, @08:23AM
Do you consider parallel construction [rt.com] by government agents to be an unofficial use? Theoretical? Mere potential?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:18AM
That would be one unofficial use.