A group called “we are always listening” has been raising awareness about the NSA by recording people’s private conversations while they speak with friends in public. The goal is to make people aware of how intrusive it is for someone to be eavesdropping on your conversation, and also to highlight the average conversation that an NSA agent would typically listen in on.
According to a post on the group’s website:
Eavesdropping on the population has revealed many saying “I’m not doing anything wrong so who cares if the NSA tracks what I say and do?”Citizens don’t seem to mind this monitoring, so we’re hiding recorders in public places in hopes of gathering information to help win the war on terror. We’ve started with NYC as a pilot program, but hope to roll the initiative out all across The Homeland. For greater transparency we’re declassifying excerpts from the recordings and highlighting where some devices are located. If you have any questions, ask them somewhere in public and eventually we’ll hear you, or email us for a quicker response.
Some of the recordings are harmless while others are potentially humiliating, although none of them are actually incriminating or terroristic. The recorders, if they are actually found, are labeled with the words “PROPERTY OF THE NSA.”
The pranksters have done their best to remain anonymous, as it is actually illegal to record someone without their permission in the state of New York, and similar laws exist in other states where this project may expand to.
What do you think about this approach? Is this a good way to raise awareness, or is this just creating more privacy violations?
John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.
This article (Pranksters Secretly Record Public Conversations And Post Them Online To Protest The NSA) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.
