ScareMail plugin will flag all your email to the NSA

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/10/nsa-filter-scaremail-email-blacklist-plugin

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An Illinois-based digital artist has created a Gmail plugin that automatically adds blacklisted words to every email in an attempt to protest against online surveillance.

Ben Grosser has designed the ScareMail plugin in a way that, he says, will be ensure that even benign emails are picked up by the security filters of America's National Security Agency.

Grosser's idea takes the opposite tack to encryption tools including PGP and Silent Text, and to the IP-masking service Tor, which are designed to hide the contents of messages or the sender.

"One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. These “selectors”, as they refer to them internally, are used to identify communications by presumed terrorists," said Grosser.

"Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviours based on words in emails."

ScareMail generates a chunk of text to append to the end of every email sent, containing as many selectors as possible.

"If every email contains the word 'plot' or 'facility,'" Grosser writes, "then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use."

The text is deliberately gibberish to a human eye, but formatted in such a way that it can't easily be discounted by a computer. A sample paragraph reads: "'I'm sorry. One crashes to fail careful.' He mutated but had not important, we mustn't vaccinate Palestine Liberation Organisation, seem it!'"

The plugin warns recipients by prefacing the text with the warning "Following Text Generated by ScareMail" — which would make it trivial for the NSA to ignore it in its current form. 

"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," said Grosser.

"All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to emails 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."

ScareMail is available as a plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and the source code is free for all at Github.

<strong>• Three MIT students wrote a program to generate gibberish – that gets accepted by academic conferences</strong>

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