ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email ‘scary’ in order to disrupt National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms to the signature of every new email. This ‘story’ acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense. Each email’s story is unique, in an attempt to avoid automated filtering by NSA search systems.
