Operation Troll The NSA

This seems like a joke that got overdone - I can imagine someone saying 'hey it would be funny if the whole world emailed each suspicious shit to troll the NSA' across a dinner table but any more than that and it stops being funny

300bps• 13 years ago

What they need is for the site to randomly generate a more unique phrase for each person that loads the page.

Basically, come up with a list of trigger words and then work them into innocuous sections of text in a random manner. That way "they" can't filter out the text being sent.

Justsignedup2• 13 years ago

We can do one better. Why don't the site just run that through google translate and we just play it back. Yeah that sounds better. The pronunciation would work quite well for the speech recognizer.

So doing the basic math in my head, the chance that this will succeed is... trolltastic (means like 0, since even if it has a chance of succeeding, they could ignore all phone calls from that one hour, also if this is written well, and scalable they can just spin up more workers -- so unless you can get like 20 billion phone calls I doubt it'll be an issue)!

However let's let the fun begin!

Achshar• 13 years ago

Yea, that sounds quite obvious right? If the supposed fake hate speech is a constant then all they have to do is put an if statement somewhere to make an exception about this specific email.

brbcoding• 13 years ago

Yep, seems like an easy thing to bypass. Might be better to search for these keywords within tweets or fb updates and create a script based on that (re-scrape every x users so that it changes).

angrydev• 13 years ago

If the NSA is monitoring these channels already they probably have already dealt with a volume of traffic equal to what this individual proposes.

Yver• 13 years ago

Oh look, it's Jam Echelon Day again. https://www.google.com/search?q=jam+echelon+day

serf• 13 years ago

oh look, governments keep enacting shitty ideas.

bgentry• 13 years ago

They left out the word "jihad".

quackerhacker2• 13 years ago

This "operation," is just ridiculous and childish, and worst case say it could actually pose a risk...I'm definitely a supporter of privacy, just closing ur facebook, using linux, and turning off your phone during precious conversations (reducing ur digital footprint)...that will do more than creating an unnecessary risk like this.

hellcow2• 13 years ago

Turning off your phone doesn't disable the microphone. You have to physically remove the battery.

quackerhacker2• 13 years ago

I know that was the case with Nextel phones, is that the same with iOS devices?

Zenst2• 13 years ago

Wonder if there is a market for phone modifications that add an external on/off switch for the mic's (and speakers). Silly but paranoia sells.

Zenst2• 13 years ago

I agree, it does seem somewhat silly and is akin to complaining about how rape cases are handeled by everybody going out and crying rape. Wont fix rapes, wont solve rapes, will make it harder to see real rapes taking place.

With that if this event takes place and somebody dies due to intel not being obvious due to the amount of troll/spam then would those instigating the troll/spam and those partaking in it be as guilty of the crime that was not stopped.

Certainly not a impossible situation and with that I sure would not wont to be responsible impossing detrement against another, even if the intentions were good, the approach is wrong.

touristtam• 13 years ago

Not advocating the use of a spam bot, but surely it uses would be more efficient ...

sevkih• 13 years ago

Who comes up with these? Do you really think they won't check the sha of that text against something? Imagine the 100 billion dollars of "Buy boner pills @ onlinepharmacy.ru" type emails which make the 68.6% of all the email sent worldwide, do they really think that they can top that?

if (mail.sha == "6ead421c0d8c4e36dbe5c4f5b2f14d93fa634da65f024f6440e4cafc13e7d0e4") irs_audit(mail.sender);

jayfuerstenberg• 13 years ago

They still have to waste CPU cycles comparing either the plaintext or the checksum as you suggest.

If nothing else it makes their server room A/C more expensive.

Cakez0r• 13 years ago

Is this really relevant to HN? There's nothing of substance in the content at all.

Reddit is a much more relevant platform for mildly interesting stuff that's happening on the internet. I wish the mods would be more aggressive with moderating submissions.

dalke• 13 years ago

Occasionally call phone numbers at random.

Ask about the weather. How was the ball game? Don't take long.

Then hang up.

Associations networks will hate us if we all do that.

Operation Troll The NSA

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