A woman at a gym tells her friend she pays rent higher than $2,000 a month. An ex-Microsoft employee describes his work as an artist to a woman he's interviewing to be his assistant—he makes paintings and body casts, as well as something to do with infrared light that’s hard to discern from his foreign accent. Another man describes his gay lover’s unusual sexual fetish, which involves engaging in fake fistfights, “like we were doing a scene from Batman Returns." 
 
 These conversations—apparently real ones, whose participants had no knowledge an eavesdropper might be listening—were recorded and published by the NSA. Well, actually no, not the NSA, but an anonymous group of anti-NSA protestors claiming to be contractors of the intelligence agency and launching a new "pilot program" in New York City on its behalf. That spoof of a pilot program, as the prankster provocateurs describe and document in videos on their website, involves planting micro-cassette recorders under tables and benches around New York city, retrieving the tapes and embedding the resulting audio on their website: Wearealwayslistening.com. 
 
 A note, tape recorder and USB drive anonymously sent to WIRED's New York office. The USB drive contained a video showing one of the recorders being stealthily planted under a table. 
 
 "Eavesdropping on the population has revealed many saying 'I’m not doing anything wrong so who cares if the NSA tracks what I say and do?' Citizens don’t seem to mind this monitoring, so we’re hiding recorders in public places in hopes of gathering information to help win the war on terror," reads a message on the project's website. "We've started with NYC as a pilot program, but hope to roll the initiative out all across The Homeland." 
 
 Another page of the project's website embeds the audio from five of those surreptitious recordings of New Yorkers' conversations, including the ones described above. The group likely has many hours more of surveillance tape from the low-tech spy bugs they've scattered around the city. 
 
 The project’s creators have chosen to remain anonymous, no doubt in part to avoid the legal controversy surrounding secret recordings of private conversations under New York law. But they tipped off WIRED to their work in an encrypted email a day ahead of their project’s launch Wednesday. They say they've planted dozens of the microcassette recorders around New York over the last year. "The NSA employs many 3rd party contractors, [and] we consider ourselves to be contractors of this nature, albeit in a unpaid and unsanctioned capacity," reads the email. "We can attest to the fact all people recorded are NOT actors and are not knowingly involved in the project in any way." 
 
 That anonymous email was followed by an envelope sent to WIRED’s New York office containing a single page with the printed words “We’re listening as you read this,” along with the group's website url. Inside the envelope was also one of the group's tape recorders (without a tape) and a USB stick containing the video below, which shows one of the recorders being surreptitiously planted under a restaurant table, marked with the words "PROPERTY OF NSA." 
 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxJgK0ND2DY&feature=youtu.be 
 
 A link on the We Are Always Listening site makes clear the project's larger political purpose: The word "Angry?" in the site's menu connects to a page on the ACLU's website that asks Americans to protest the renewal of Patriot Act, whose deadline looms on June 1. The ACLU page asks voters to petition Congress in particular to allow the 215 Section of the law to sunset, which would end the bulk collection of metadata about Americans' communications, revealed in the first published leak of classified material by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 
 
 A spoofed NSA logo created by the group. Its latin translates to "We Are Always Listening." 
 
 Despite that link, ACLU spokesperson Stacy Sullivan tells WIRED that the group isn't affiliated with the people behind the eavesdropping prank, though the ACLU did grant them permission to link to the group's petition page. Sullivan wouldn't say whether she knew the creators' identities. The NSA didn't immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment. 
 
 The recordings posted to the site don't name any of the eavesdropped speakers. But they do include the locations where the recordings were made, which could provide just enough information to identify some of those speakers. And regardless of anonymity, the prank is likely illegal: Secretly recording a conversation in New York requires the consent of at least one of the people recorded—a tape recorder planted under a table and retrieved later certainly doesn't qualify. 
 
 Of the five recordings published on the project's website so far, three of the recorders used to get them remain in place, and an untold number of others could still be planted around the city. So, careful what you say in public, New Yorkers—unless, of course, you have nothing to hide. ||||| Are anti-NSA pranksters invading people's privacy? 
 
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 Civil liberties groups in the US say the National Security Agency's surveillance program amounts to illegal spying on innocent citizens. And now, a group of anonymous anti-NSA pranksters is trying to make a point about the surveillance of ordinary people by doing it themselves. 
 
 Over the past year, they've hidden dozens of mini tape recorders under tables and benches around New York City, secretly taping people's conversations. This week, they launched a website where they've posted some of their recordings. They range from the mundane, like a woman at a gym talking about her plans for the evening, to the intimate, like a man at a restaurant talking about his lover's fetishes. 
 
 The people behind this project claim to be contractors working for the NSA, even though their website links to the ACLU's instructions on how to urge Congress to repeal part of the Homeland Security Act. They say they've launched a new "pro bono" pilot program on behalf of the agency - despite not having been asked by the NSA to do this. We talk to one of the project's creators about what they're trying to achieve, and ask how recording and posting unsuspecting people's conversations without their consent can be justified. We agreed to withhold his identity at his request. 
 
 This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 
 
 Why have you asked us not to reveal your identity? 
 
 Well, our operatives can really complete our mission with much greater efficiency if our identities are not known. 
 
 Are you worried about legal repercussions for yourself and for the project? 
 
 No. Our agents are not. 
 
 But to be clear, what you're doing is against the law New York State, because to record a conversation, one person needs to give their consent to being taped. So why are you doing this? 
 
 If people were really bothered by this type of surveillance, we imagine that they would be sending their their feelings towards their government representatives to respond to the NSA's tactics. And certainly what we've been hearing over and over again is, "I'm not saying or doing anything wrong, so it's really fine if I am listened in on." So since we've heard the overwhelming response to the NSA's actions, we figured that we would step in and help with the NSA's actions. These people aren't doing anything wrong. They really have nothing to be concerned about and there should be no element of being surprised or hurt by an invasion of privacy. 
 
 I think I understand the point you're trying to make about mass surveillance and about the NSA. But you're essentially trying to make that point by doing the same thing, which is violating people's privacy. 
 
 You're certainly welcome to process it that way. We look at it as we're trying to keep the country and the world at large safe. Part of the freedoms that we're trying to protect are not just the freedoms of people's physical wellbeing, but people's freedoms to show dissent and speak up to power. We've given people a place at the site to express their dissatisfaction with with this type of surveillance. So if this type of surveillance really bothers them, there's really a way for people en masse to let their voices be heard and have this type of surveillance and data mining be stopped. 
 
 And so as you go about conducting this "surveillance," what are you doing to protect people's identities? 
 
 We have not released anybody's first and last names on the recordings. Through our data collection, we have heard people give their bank account numbers to their customer service representatives at their banks. People talk about passwords to different services that they use online and we've deleted those and not made those public. We have not released anything that would compromise any particular individual. 
 
 But you list the exact location of where the recorder was hidden and you're posting pictures of the locations too. Couldn't someone figure out who that person was, at a location talking about a specific thing? 
 
 It's very interesting you say that, because the NSA can actually put together your whereabouts past, present and future with much less information than that. The NSA uses many, many, many third party contractors and we consider ourselves to be one of them, albeit in a freelance, pro bono non-official way. 
 
 A not asked way. 
 
 No, no one has asked us yet, but we feel pretty confident that the NSA would approve of our actions, since we're really trying to aid them in their efforts. 
 
 What if someone hears themselves on your website wants you to take the clip down? What are you going to do? 
 
 Well, there is an email address. So far, we haven't had that response. Our agents would have to really go over that and work on that on a case-by-case basis. So far, we haven't received any emails asking that to happen. And again, we have a place where people can vent their frustration to people much more powerful than us. We're a small organization. There's a big conversation happening and a debate and laws being changed on the Hill this week. So it would be a really good time for people to weigh in with their voices. 
 
 There has been a long debate over privacy and the N.S.A. and CSIS, our spy agency here in Canada. What are you hoping that it's adding to the conversation? 
 
 What we're hoping to add to the conversation is people to have an awareness of how even the most mundane conversation reveals quite a bit about your life, your patterns of behavior. But it seems that there are people who are aware of that, because they've said quite loudly, as I've said before, "As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, I don't see why people have a problem with governments and their third party vendors that they work with knowing who I speak to, how often I speak to them, where I speak to them." And in some cases, you don't even really need to know and hear the conversation to know what you're speaking about. If the NSA understands that you're calling a doctor's office and a particular type of doctor over and over again, they don't need to listen to the details in the granular piece of those conversations to figure out what's going on in your life. 
 
 What's most interesting thing that you've heard on these tapes? 
 
 I don't think you have the security clearance to hear the most interesting pieces. And what's interesting to one might not be to another. So, that's really a judgment call that I'm not in a position to make. 
 
 Okay you're helping the NS. do their job is what you're saying. 
 
 Oh, absolutely. And we consider it a really important mission. But If the tactics and them completing their mission were deemed illegal or unconstitutional, we would immediately stop. 
 
 Aren't you deceiving people? Your tape recorders actually say "Property of the NSA." 
 
 Well, we feel since we're working on behalf of the NSA, that we took the liberty to say that we're working for their mission, that this would be the best way to identify our devices. And if someone were to find one, we hope that they can just drop it in the mailbox somewhere and it would be delivered to the NSA and then that way, we can get our information even quicker to the NSA, rather than having to go to our website and listen to what we found they can get ahold of it that way. 
 
 How would you feel if you were on the other side of this and one of your private conversations ended up online? 
 
 I assume my private conversations are being listened to by many. That's an assumption that most people should make, that their private comings and goings are not are not completely between the people that they think they're having them with. ||||| On Wednesday evening, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald published a top-secret court order telling Verizon to turn over metadata on millions of business customers — length of calls, phone numbers of both parties, phone-specific identification information, and probably proximate call location, but not the content of calls — to the National Security Agency for three months, from April 25 until July 19, on a daily basis. 
 
 This is a big deal, Greenwald says, because it "shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." It appears, Greenwald adds, to be a continuation of the type of data-mining operation secretly authorized by George W. Bush in October 2001, exposed in 2006, to great furor, then made legal by Congress in 2008. 
 
 We don't know much about how the NSA and other spy agencies work, since their rules are classified. But here's what we know — and think we know — about this potential bombshell of a leak: 
 
 The NSA can do this — legally? 
 
 The short answer is: Yes, probably. Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act gives the federal government broad authority to demand a number of "tangible things," including phone records, from telecommunications firms, as long as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) agrees they are "relevant" to a national security investigation. 
 
 Civil liberties and privacy groups have been arguing that the federal government is misinterpreting the law. "This confirms what we had long suspected" since at least 2006, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells The Washington Post. "Section 215 is written as if they're going after individual people based on individual investigations.... There's no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation." 
 
 There are a few important caveats here, says Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy. First, the law "says that the 'things' that are collected must be relevant to a national security investigation or threat assessment, but it says nothing about the scope of the things obtained." It would be "surprising — and troubling" — if the Obama administration is counting whole phone-log databases as a "thing," but that's the larger problem: Figuring out what this court order means. "While this is potentially a huge story," Kerr says, "we don't yet have substantial certainty that the facts are what they have been reported to be." 
 
 The Guardian has the FISC order but was unable to get anyone to say anything about its context. I don't think we yet know if this 3-page order is what it appears to be, or if there is some other document that may reveal limitations not clear from the 3-page order. Note that the order is titled "Secondary Order," which presumably means that there is a primary one that it follows; we don't know what that order said. [Volokh Conspiracy] 
 
 The other big question mark, says Marc Ambinder at The Week, is why the FBI sought the information. 
 
 The language [in the law] doesn't rule out such bulk disclosures, but it suggests that the FBI or NSA has to provide the FISC with a good reason for doing so. The court finds that an undefined "application" from the FBI satisfies that Patriot Act provision... [but] we don't know what application the FISC order responds to. [The Week] 
 
 Let's be clear, says Joshua Foust at his blog. "The NSA, despite the broad nature of its warrant request, did nothing illegal, and the supposed illegality of the FISC procedure has not been demonstrated." 
 
 Who's affected by the data culling? 
 
 The court order is aimed at all customers of Verizon Business Network Services. That is "one of the nation's largest telecommunications and internet providers for corporations," say Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt in The New York Times. "It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cell phone services, or to other telecommunications carriers." 
 
 Previous reporting, says Greenwald in The Guardian, "has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks." Martin Longman at Booman Tribune speculates that the same is true here: "Since this is a leaked court order, I think we can safely assume that all the other phone carriers received a court order, too." 
 
 Who authorized the phone-log haul? 
 
 Roger Vinson, a senior federal judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Before this order was made public, Vinson was perhaps most famous for ruling that the ObamaCare individual mandate to buy insurance is unconstitutional — a decision not upheld by the Supreme Court. 
 
 Funny how things work out: The Tea Party hero who struck down Obamacare also authorized the NSA Verizon warrant. twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/st… — southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 6, 2013 
 
 Under the Patriot Act, such NSA requests can be approved by either a FISA court judge or "a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court." 
 
 Was this a one-off thing? 
 
 We don't know. But an unidentified "expert in this aspect of the law" tells The Washington Post that this order appears to be, as the Post puts it, "a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006." 
 
 The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency. The expert referred to such orders as "rubber stamps" sought by the telephone companies to protect themselves after the disclosure in 2005 that widespread warrantless wiretaps could leave them liable for damages. [Washington Post] 
 
 "My own understanding," says Ambinder at The Week, "is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records." 
 
 It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. 
 
 In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. [The Week] 
 
 Why is everyone making such a big deal of this? 
 
 The idea that the government is spying on its own citizens is kind of creepy. It's important to note that this isn't wiretapping, and "this sort of fishing expedition can sometimes be useful to counter-terrorism," says Juan Cole at Informed Comment, "but fishing expeditions into private papers and records are a violation of the U.S. constitution," and a recipe for all sorts of potential political abuses. 
 
 The government should only be allowed to see private information if there is reasonable cause to think something illegal is going on. Going looking into private records to see if patterns emerge that suggest illegality is the action of a totalitarian government, not a democratic one. The USA Patriot Act was a Sovietization of American law and practice and 2001 was year one of the fall of the Republic, when the Fourth Amendment and aspects of the First Amendment were abrogated. [Informed Comment] 
 
 In fairness, "the government can't keep this information forever, nor can they share information on a willy-nilly basis," says Booman Tribune's Longman. "And it's too much information for them to look at without running it through sophisticated computers." 
 
 Those computers aren't looking to see if you're cheating your business partner or fooling around on your husband. But this is concerning nonetheless, because they're using a provision of a law that is supposed to allow the government to snoop on business records in certain defined circumstances to sweep up every electronic communication in the country. [Booman Tribune] 
 
 Who's to blame? 
 
 The Obama administration, for one. On Thursday, a senior administration official confirmed that the government is vacuuming up massive amounts of phone logs, arguing that such data collection is "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States." 
 
 If you're upset about the government possibly knowing who you call and when, you could also blame the FISC judges who sign off on the data sweeps. But if you really want to nail someone, look to your senator or congressman, says Joshua Foust. "All of the opprobrium you should feel at the government's ridiculously broad surveillance powers needs to be directed at CONGRESS, which keeps approving them while voting they stay secret." 
 
 Congress voted to legalize expansive surveillance powers in 2001 (The USA Patriot Act), 2008 (retroactive immunity for warrantless NSA wiretaps in the FISA Amendments Act), and in 2012 (renewing the FISA Amendments Act). Congress declined to force administration transparency/honesty on secret interpretations of the law in 2001 (USA Patriot Act), 2008 (NSA immunity), 2011 (the [Sen. Ron] Wyden amendment to the NDAA, which would have required interpretations not be secret) & 2012 (the similar [Sen. Jeff] Merkley amendment to the NDAA). Those last two actually got voted down, which means Congress voted to enable secret government legal interpretation. [Joshua Foust] 
 
 What's the fix? 
 
 Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) — both on the Senate intelligence committee — have been publicly urging the Obama administration to lay out its interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act for at least a year. "As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows," they wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. "This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says." 
 
 Other people, like Juan Cole, want the Patriot Act — or as he calls it, "the most un-American and anti-patriotic piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act" — repealed, or at least greatly scaled back. This data reaping is "astonishing and appalling on many levels," says Andrew Kirell at Mediaite, but it is not surprising in post-9/11 America. 
 
 This latest example of Obama overreach is sure to rankle the feathers of conservatives.... While many of these same conservatives were rah-rah'ing the expansion of the NSA and United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the Bush years, it is a pleasant change to see them finally care about FISA. Welcome aboard. Now it's up to the liberals who rightly lauded Obama's anti-FISA stance in 2008 to swallow their pride as well and take a stand against this administration's overreach, despite what they might see as partisan opportunism coming from the right. 
 
 As the last 13 years have proven, regardless of who is in the White House the security state will continue to expand. And it will take some hypocrisy on both sides to finally end it. [Mediaite] 
 
 This data-mining could be "Orwellian," or it could be narrower than we think, says Ambinder. "Unfortunately, we don't know precisely what the NSA can do because its rules are highly classified." At the very least, "this disclosure will hopefully force the government to clarify the rules it uses to actually analyze the data it collects."
– Spending time in New York City these days? You might peek under the table or bench you're using to see if there's a tape recorder marked "PROPERTY OF NSA"—which was placed there by anti-NSA activists trying to make a point, the Guardian reports. The activists won't identify themselves, but have posted recordings (which they claim are authentic) on WeAreAlwaysListening.com. Some are kinda embarrassing, too, like the students who brag about tricking a roommate into leaving, the Asian men who mock other Asians for speaking in an Asian manner, or the guy whose gay lover liked acting out fight scenes as part of sex. It was "like Batman Returns," he says. "Bam! Boom! Kazam. Ah you got me!” The point, of course, is political: Anyone upset by the tapes can send "their feelings towards their government representatives to respond to the NSA's tactics," one of the activists tells the CBC. Some NSA supporters have said they approve of domestic surveillance because they're not doing anything wrong, he notes, and suggests these recordings will put that to the test. Their website links the word "Angry?" to an ACLU page where people can oppose the renewal of the Patriot Act, which is due to end June 1, Wired reports. For the record: What the activists are doing violates state law, and the ACLU says it isn't affiliated with them, but did allow the link. Meanwhile, "careful what you say in public, New Yorkers—unless, of course, you have nothing to hide," says Wired.