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.