Here’s the perfect way to retaliate against the NSA for all that privacy they’ve been violating lately: “Operation: Troll the NSA,” a campaign that’s asking anyone who cares to send the same buzzword-laced but ultimately innocuous email at the same time this Wednesday. To participate, simply copy and paste the pre-written text into an email and send it to a friend (or yourselfif you’ve got multiple addresses).
What’s the point? Here’s a sample paragraph: “I just read this article about how these free radical particles can cause the downfall of good health and accelerate aging. These could actually cause death to millions of Americans. If these particles are flying around undetected everywhere, does that mean we’re all radicalized?”
Get it? “Radical,” “downfall,” “death to millions of Americans?” The script uses phrases that could alert the NSA’s scanners to a potential terrorist danger, but its actual content couldn’t be less threatening. If a bunch of people send it at once, will the powers that be notice?
“If millions of us, all at the exact same time, call or email someone with our keywords-of-terror-filled script,” the campaign’s creators write on their site, “We can give our nation’s nation’s impressive surveillance apparatus the kind of test it deserves. They say they don’t read or listen to the contents of our messages. Why not test it out?”
According to Mike Lacher, one of the two men behind Operation: Troll the NSA, it began as a drunken lark, albeit one with serious intentions. “[Co-creator Chris Baker] was hanging out with his dad in DC, and his dad drunkenly declared it would be hilarious if everybody yelled ‘bomb’ on the phone at the same time to see if the NSA would notice,” Lacher told ANIMAL. “We took that drunken fatherly insight and made it into trollthensa.com.”
“We just wanted to make a fun comment on the current controversy going on,” he added. “Hopefully as many people as possible will pass it around and participate. We’d love it if it came to the NSA’s attention.”
To get in on the trolling, just send an email containing the full text of the script, available here, at 7:00PM Eastern this Wednesday, June 12. We’ll see what happens.
