Reddit to thwart the NSA’s tracking plans with a gift exchange? Yup.

Reddit’s gift exchange service has come up with a rather unique way of derailing the NSA’s over-reaching efforts to collect data on U.S. citizens.

One of the ways the NSA is doing this is by tracking a large list of flagged keywords that are pretty common to everyday conversation. Sites like Motherboard.tv’s “Hello, NSA” takes that list of terms and automatically generates a phrase using a few of them that you can then post all over the Internet. The purpose is to basically skew all of the NSA’s efforts by going out of your way to mention these terms — thus making them less unique to terrorism (I mean, if they really were unique to terrorism in the first place.)

So, Reddit’s idea is to craft a gift exchange around this concept. When you sign up for the exchange, you’re given an automatically generated phrase using some of your favorite words from the NSA’s list. While you can paste the phrase anywhere across the web, you’re also being asked to formulate a gift to send to another Reddit gift exchange participant.

For example, here’s my phrase: “The world’s most popular condom brands is named after the Trojan army. Is there so-meth-ing sick about that?” From that, I can expect to get a bag of army camo condoms, a handkerchief,  or maybe a bag of blue Breaking Bad crystal meth rock candy.

I would probably talk about these gifts in social network updates, blog comments, or maybe even an article. Anyway this is by far one of the most unusual ways to fight back against the NSA. And I would expect nothing less from Reddit.

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