More than a few people were unhappy to learn about the NSA’s massive surveillance infrastructure, and within days of Ed Snowden’s first leaks we learned all kinds of hints and tricks to avoid its digital dragnet. But even with software like the Tor web browser and search engines like DuckDuckGo that claims not to track its users, it’s almost impossible to stay completely off the radar, so is there anything else that could be done?

Well, there is if you listen to university graduate and artist Benjamin Grosser, who’s developed a new browser extension for Gmail that aims to wage war against the NSA… with nonsense.

Called “ScareMail“, Grosser’s Gmail browser extension essentially aims to beat the NSA at its own game, by flooding its servers with fake ‘scare stories’ inserted into the signature of every email you send. According to Grosser, the aim of ScareMail is to “disrupt the NSA’s surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless”.

ScareMail works by randomly generating fake, nonsensical stories for each email you send, stuffed with keywords that are believed to set off the NSA’s alarms. Such keywords include terms like “al-Shabaab”, “cyber attack”, “North Korea”, “domestic nuclear detection” and so forth – anything that will force the NSA’s spies to sit up and take notice.

But what’s the point of sending this nonsense with each email? Well, recent documents leaked by Ed Snowden show us that the NSA doesn’t actually read our emails at all. Rather, it uses a tool called XKEYSCORE that mines massive troves of data scooped up from the web, selecting any communications that contain one of the keywords on its list and marking these for further examination. Basically what ScareMail intends to do is to throw a spanner in the NSA’s works as a kind of protest – the hope is that if enough people start using it, the agency’s servers might be overwhelmed with nonsensical information that its spies will have to sift through.

Here’s an example of the kind of nonsense ScareMail might attach to your mail:

However, on his website, Grosser says that he isn’t just trying to annoy the NSA. The real goal of ScareMail is to provoke questions about the relationship between surveillance and words:

“The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA’s growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights.”

ScareMail just generates a bunch of random words and adds these to the end of emails that people send, thus revealing one of the biggest flaws in the NSA’s surveillance operation – words do not necessarily add up to intent.

Grosser has posted a video demonstrating how ScareMail works, in which he claims that “all of your emails are subject to broad and unrelenting surveillance.” Things might not be as bad as all that – for example, Gmail uses SSL encryption that makes them incredibly difficult to eavesdrop, and of course Google has repeatedly insisted that the NSA has no “back door” into its servers.

But not everyone believes Google’s denials, which is why a tool like ScareMail will have a lot of appeal among the most paranoid web users. If nothing else, ScareMail is a brilliant bit of creative civil disobedience, and one that could easily worry the NSA’s analysts if the idea catches on.

 
Check out our full coverage of NSA stories over on Springpad.