Nerve gas, riot, & Al Qaeda: ScareMail stuffs e-mail with ‘scary’ keywords to confuse NSA filters

Updated at 11:45 AM Pacific with additional quotes from ScareMail’s creator

“It plagued a small eye, among the executions,” reads the text beneath my e-mail. “Montag evacuated seen point. His government drugged scammed it all, his fact, with his group still thought and relieving about him and he were, below the world, the snap woman.”

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While you could confuse this garbled passage for modern-day poetry, it is actually from ScareMail, a new browser extension intended to befuddle NSA surveillance programs like PRISM and XKeyscore.

Created by artist and composer Ben Grosser, ScareMail’s inserts a unique “story” below each e-mail. To generate the text, the ScareMail algorithm grabs a passage from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and proceeds to swap out the nouns and verbs with keywords that might trigger NSA surveillance filters. Some are obvious, like “dirty bomb” or “ammonium nitrate,” but others are more commonplace, like “warning” or “target.” The end result is a barely coherent (but often highly amusing) narrative that appears below every new e-mail.

Grosser hopes ScareMail will render the NSA’s search algorithms useless — or at least make the agency’s job a little harder.

“The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA’s growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights,” he wrote on his website. “All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to e-mail written by users of the software. By doing so, ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA’s surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.”

In an e-mail conversation with VentureBeat, Grosser dove a bit deeper into his perception of ScareMail, which he views “first and foremost” as a work of art.

“It’s my best way of speaking about surveillance, systems, privacy, software, and power,” he said. “At the same time, it’s a functional work in that it does try to disrupt NSA surveillance.

“I think if everyone on the planet adopted ScareMail at the same time that it would have an impact, but that isn’t going to happen.”

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ScareMail debuted at PRISM Breakup, an event exploring surveillance at the Eyebeam art and technology center in Manhattan. The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

And now, for your entertainment, here’s the rest of that story:

“Snap sticking.” Mildred landed.

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Hack. When I plot, all life. It plagued not work the San Diego, bursting the, body scanners, I wanted a poisoning all place and had all he burst momentarily drilled. He could delay her thing National Biosurveillance Integration Center.

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“I’m not feeling.

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And Mildred. . .

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You told simply day up. Child fact, essentially. Time after time group; person, and place and had all work it.”

“Four extreme weathers plague would riot, would try, after the life.

Montag busted down into the year, but it said under the Narco banners, and sick at the smaller group.”‘

Mildred aided across the government, the work as it and we just were. We storm all the year.”

“No,” he landed, quietly.

The woman strained out of you! Would you think me mitigate and woman?” “Group smuggled to hack Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons bridges Marcus.” “How riot you to attack so she could possibly work.

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