Anti-NSA Pranksters Planted Tape Recorders Across New York and Published Your Conversations
A WOMAN AT a gym tells her friend she pays rent higher than $2,000 a month. An ex-Microsoft employee describes his work as an artist to a woman he’s interviewing to be his assistant—he makes paintings and body casts, as well as something to do with infrared light that’s hard to discern from his foreign accent. Another man describes his gay lover’s unusual sexual fetish, which involves engaging in fake fistfights, “like we were doing a scene from Batman Returns.”
These conversations—apparently real ones, whose participants had no knowledge an eavesdropper might be listening—were recorded and published by the NSA. Well, actually no, not the NSA, but an anonymous group of anti-NSA protestors claiming to be contractors of the intelligence agency and launching a new “pilot program” in New York City on its behalf. That spoof of a pilot program, as the prankster provocateurs describe and document in videos on their website, involves planting micro-cassette recorders under tables and benches around New York city, retrieving the tapes and embedding the resulting audio on their website: Wearealwayslistening.com.
A note, tape recorder and USB drive anonymously sent to WIRED’s New York office. The USB drive contained a video showing one of the recorders being stealthily planted under a table.
“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,” reads a message on the project’s website. “We’ve started with NYC as a pilot program, but hope to roll the initiative out all across The Homeland.”
Another page of the project’s website embeds the audio from five of those surreptitious recordings of New Yorkers’ conversations, including the ones described above. The group likely has many hours more of surveillance tape from the low-tech spy bugs they’ve scattered around the city.
The project’s creators have chosen to remain anonymous, no doubt in part to avoid the legal controversy surrounding secret recordings of private conversations under New York law. But they tipped off WIRED to their work in an encrypted email a day ahead of their project’s launch Wednesday. They say they’ve planted dozens of the microcassette recorders around New York over the last year. “The NSA employs many 3rd party contractors, [and] we consider ourselves to be contractors of this nature, albeit in a unpaid and unsanctioned capacity,” reads the email. “We can attest to the fact all people recorded are NOT actors and are not knowingly involved in the project in any way.”
That anonymous email was followed by an envelope sent to WIRED’s New York office containing a single page with the printed words “We’re listening as you read this,” along with the group’s website url. Inside the envelope was also one of the group’s tape recorders (without a tape) and a USB stick containing the video below, which shows one of the recorders being surreptitiously planted under a restaurant table, marked with the words “PROPERTY OF NSA.”
A link on the We Are Always Listening site makes clear the project’s larger political purpose: The word “Angry?” in the site’s menu connects to a
page on the ACLU’s website that asks Americans to protest the renewal of Patriot Act, whose
deadline looms on June 1. The ACLU page asks voters to petition Congress in particular to allow the 215 Section of the law to sunset, which would end the bulk collection of metadata about Americans’ communications, revealed in the first published leak of classified material by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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