If You Get Gibberish Emails

You’ll know why

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.

I had thought about adding black listed words to my communications; glad someone found a way to automate the process.

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.

The NSA could eliminate those emails from their filters if they choose though.

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.

But by doing so they increase our privacy; if enough people use this, the NSA would be overwhelmed with false positives or have to ignore large chunks of people’s communications.

“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.”

More accurate to say is not all words equal intent. Sometimes they do but to give up our essential liberty of free speech and privacy in the vain hope of safety is not something I’m willing to do. It isn’t something the government should be forcing people to do.

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

So folks, if you start seeing ‘scary words’ in my emails; you’ll know why.

Please join the discussion.