concept

In the summer of 2013, a Forbes article and a Reddit post exposed a roster of "suspicious words" actively monitored and flagged by the NSA on the internet and social media. The list, comprising seven hundred terms out of an undisclosed total, shed light on a longstanding government practice. For decades, authorities had been keen on tracking instances of accessing "red flag" literature from public libraries. However, the advent of the internet presented an unprecedented opportunity for surveillance methods to operate on a much larger scale.

This disclosure provided me with a chance to leverage the leak. I seized the opportunity to craft a play on words, intertwining contemporary aphorisms with the targeted keywords. This strategic move aimed to resonate and potentially proliferate across the vast expanse of the internet.

User interaction

As an interactive art installation, visitors could participate with this piece. Users had the option of either generating a NS•Aphorism at random, or constructing their own from the NSA list and existing aphorisms. An existing aphorism would have its subject or nouns swapped with a suspicious word. The user then had the option of publishing it on Twitter by logging in via Oauth.