NSA has currently been in the news for their controversial, over-reaching efforts to collect data on U.S. citizens. In order to combat the cryptic intelligence agency, Reddit gift exchange has come up with a unique method utilizing keywords to throw off the organization.
One of the ways the NSA collects its data is by tracking a large list of flagged keywords that are common to everyday conversation. Sites like Motherboard.tv’s “Hello, NSA” are fighting back, taking the list of terms and automatically generating phrases using a few of them that users can then post all over the Internet. The goal is to skew data that NSA collects by making these terms less unique to terrorism (if they really were unique to terrorism in the first place.)
Now Reddit has created a social machine to thwart the NSA’s plans. The “front page of the internet’s” idea is to craft a gift exchange around this concept. When users sign up for the exchange, they are given an automatically generated phrase using words from the NSA’s list. They can then paste the phrase anywhere across the web, and they’re also asked to formulate a gift based on the phrase to send to another Redditer through the site’s gift exchange system.
For example, Venture Beat staff writer Tom Cheredar created his phrase which reads, “The world’s most popular condom brands is named after the Trojan army. Is there so-meth-ing sick about that ” From that, Cheredar says he “can expect to get a bag of army camo condoms, a handkerchief, or maybe a bag of blue Breaking Bad crystal meth rock candy.”
“I would probably talk about these gifts in social network updates, blog comments, or maybe even an article,” says Cheredar. “Anyway this is by far one of the most unusual ways to fight back against the NSA. And I would expect nothing less from Reddit.”
Source: VentureBeat
