The buzzwords include the likes of “Al-Qaeda” and “Al-Shabab,” yet also more mundane terms like “breach,” “threat,” “death” and “hostage,” among many others. Documents released by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA uses the “selector” terms to sift through Internet data it collects via a tool known as “XKEYSCORE.” “If every email contains the word ‘plot,’ or ‘facility,’ for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use,” Grosser says. Grosser, 43, said the extension tool, which took him about three weeks to build, is a form of protest in that he hopes it will overwhelm or frustrate the agency’s programs with superfluous information. For example, he shows on his website how a typical ScareMail sentence could begin: "Captain Beatty failed on his Al-Shabaab, hacking relentlessly about the fact to phish this far, and strand her group on the wall-to-wall in calling suspicious packages...."
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:27:27 +0000