“It makes for nuclear threats. Well, this government so important? Because they think phishing. It might make the world as it resisted.”

This text may appear as a meaningless jargon of words — and that’s because it is. Benjamin Grosser, a visiting instructor in the School of Art and Design, is the creator of ScareMail, a web browser add-on that adds “threatening” text to the bottom of emails in an attempt to disrupt NSA surveillance. 

“It’s first and foremost a work of art. I’m an artist, and I’m interested in how software affects culture and how software changes who we are,” Grosser said. 

Grosser’s ScareMail software takes original source text — in this case, the text from Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” a novel set in a dystopian state — and performs natural language processing, a system that identifies all of the nouns and verbs in the text and then exchanges those words with properly formatted and conjugated versions of what he refers to as “scary words.”

The “scary words” were taken from a Homeland Security keyword list and are Grosser’s best guess at the types of words the NSA might be looking for in emails. 

From there, the process is simple: users compose an email and a unique version of the converted text is automatically added at the bottom. The text is different every time and is also editable.

The intended results of the project are speculative, Grosser said, as the techniques used by the NSA to conduct surveillance are largely unknown. Yet he is familiar with a method he refers to as blanket collection of Internet traffic, a process that includes searching material for certain keywords.

“People who write certain words that might suggest they’re doing something the government wants to know about,” Grosser said. “(ScareMail is) essentially setting a trap for the NSA, a false trap, so that the software systems out there scouring Internet traffic looking for evidence of something mysterious will catch these meaningless nonsense stories that look intelligible.”

Computer science professor Roy Campbell, director of the Center for Advanced Research in Information Security, is speculative of the results of ScareMail.

“I think it will cause chaos, to be honest,” Campbell said. “(ScareMail is) well-intentioned, but I don’t think that it will have the right effect because this will go on irrespective of his program.”

Campbell represented the University in 2008 in receiving the National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research award from the U.S. National Security Agency. The award is a renewable five-year designation that recognizes universities whose graduate research programs in information assurance demonstrate a significant impact.

“The NSA’s just another one of the organizations that is trying to make things work for everybody. They may be doing (it) in what we think is an inappropriate way, but their intention is to actually protect as opposed to disrupt,” Campbell said. 

Although the extension is currently only available for Gmail, a ScareMail generator is available for users to copy and paste text into their emails. 

“I think (ScareMail) would definitely be very effective if it got a strong enough support that it could overload the NSA’s ability to filter through the messages. I think a lot of them that get picked up are just random and not actually threatening emails,” said Patrick Slade, webmaster for the Engineering Information Bureau of the Engineering Council and freshman in Engineering.

Grosser is the creator of more than 20 projects that focus on areas of social media, communication, interaction, technology and art. He also recently developed a Facebook Demetricator, a web browser add-on inspired by examining Facebook’s quantifications and how they guide users’ interactions. For example, how does the amount of ‘likes’ received change the type of material users post? By using the add-on, all of the numbers disappear — 500 friends becomes “friends” and five likes becomes “likes.” 

“What does it mean when we focus on how many people commented rather than who they are or what they said,” Grosser said. “I guess that I am as embedded in the use of software systems as anybody. I’m critical of Facebook, but I’m also fascinated by it, enjoy it, use it all the time.”

Stemming from the Demetricator, Grossers’ next project proposal tests how “liking” in real time may guide musical performance by using a participatory audience, two saxophones and an artificial intelligence system, he said. 

If Internet trackers were to pick up on a ScareMail-laced email, Grosser said this would not necessarily mean that the NSA would start knocking down users’ doors. He sees ScareMail as a piece of protest that won’t actually cause a governmental threat to anybody.  

“I think I’m an artist who wrote a program that adds meaningless text to the end of email,” he said, adding that if the NSA starts taking action, then “I think we’ve got large problems.”

Grosser gets his ideas from his research of trying to understand how news feed systems affect human interaction, society and culture. To download ScareMail and other programs, visit his website at bengrosser.com. 

“I think drawing attention to these things is a good thing,” Campbell said. “We depend on the Internet nowadays, but it’s always good to draw public attention to problems if that can be done in a way that’s not too damaging.” 

Brittney can be reached at [email protected].

Editor’s Note: In a previous version of the article, Benjamin Grosser was quoted as saying, “I think I’m an artist who wrote a program that adds meaningless specks to the end of email.” Due to a transcription error, this should have said, “I think I’m an artist who wrote a program that adds meaningless text to the end of email.” The Daily Illini regrets the error.