You can hum along with "The U.S. Air Force (Wild Blue Yonder)" song
A German activist group has launched a political campaign—Intelexit. The latest part of the campaign, aimed at the United States' intelligence community, is a video of leaflets being dropped over the National Security Agency's (NSA) base of operations,
in Darmstadt, Germany. The facility, the group alleges, is an important cog in the United States' espionage machine throughout Europe. The leaflets told employees of the facility to quit their jobs in protest of the new level of surveillance now practiced by the agency.
“We devised the initiative after we ourselves, and those within our networks, met people who had left secret services or who were still inside,” says an Intelexit spokesman who goes by the pseudonym Ariel Fischer.
Among them is Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who leaked information about the NSA’s secret surveillance programs and appeared in a promo for the campaign. “Nothing like this existed when he was forced out of the NSA,” says Fischer. “We have been contacted by quite a few people who have either already left or wanting to leave, but we can’t reveal any details yet.”
The leaflets are just one aspect of a new activist collective
Peng! campaign.
Most of the time Peng! is a collective of smart and silly people producing creative political stunts and enriching campaigns with subversion, humour and civil disobedience.
We specialise in subversive direct action, culture jamming, civil disobedience and guerilla communications. We use these tactics to create difficult moments for politics and business and make media stories about social justice.
Peng! is a collective of activism and frankly, reminds me in many respects, of the
American Yippies. Before the drone leaflet drop, The Intelexit campaign began a few days earlier,
closer to sea level.
On Monday, a group of Berlin-based anti-surveillance activists launched Intelexit, a campaign to encourage employees of the NSA and British spy agency GCHQ to reconsider the morality of their spy work and to persuade them to quit. They planned to kick the project off with a series of billboards strategically posted near intelligence agency buildings around the world. One, reading “listen to your heart, not to private phone calls,” was to be installed next to the Dagger Complex, a military base and NSA outpost in Darmstadt, Germany, the group told WIRED. Another, with the text “the intelligence community needs a backdoor,” will appear outside GCHQ’s Cheltenham, UK headquarters, playing on the UK and US governments’ demands for a “backdoor” system to allow the decryption of citizens’ encrypted communications.