But gamifying NSA data collection like this has the consequence of rendering it comparatively toothless. With a more powerful toolset, piecing together the story that unfolds across the video files-your only real objective-would be brainless.
Obviously, these limitations are necessary to provide focus to the narrative and add structure to gameplay. Unlike in the real world, Retina will never return a false positive. There is not a single file in which one or more of the relevant characters is not present. Most notably, all of the available video clips are linked directly to the authorized surveillance targets.
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You’re free to dart in and out of clips without watching everything, of course, but there’s little reason to do so unless you’re just trying to rush through. The pace is slow enough that you’re bound to notice dialogue on the way, meaning you often watch events unfold twice: first backward and then forward. Even at its fastest setting, scrubbing back through the longest files can still take more than a minute. If you want to go back to the beginning, you’ll need to manually rewind the clip, keeping your mouse button held down the entire time. When you click a file, it begins playing just before the search term is said, often midway through. Playback tools are similarly inconvenient. While each file has a date and timestamp to help verify when you’ve made a match, you’ll still need to find both parts separately, meaning you spend a lot of time trying to guess what’s being said on the other end through context clues. In two-way video calls, which make up the bulk of the files, each side is indexed separately, meaning you only see and hear one half of the conversation. (This much should sound familiar to anyone who’s played Her Story.) You can also search directly from a video by highlighting a word or phrase in the subtitles while paused, which is cool in practice but functionally useless if you want to watch each clip in full. Clips can only be accessed by entering specific words or phrases spoken by the people in them, and to prevent abuse of the system by inputting common words, only the first five results are displayed for any given query.
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Credit: Annapurna InteractiveĪccessing as many videos as possible so you can piece together the full story is an exercise in working around these constraints. Retina, as the fake database is called, offers only extremely limited search functionality-a necessary precaution to protect the privacy of those whose data is collected, according to an in-game document.
You play as an unidentified woman using a fictionalized version of XKeyscore to access a stolen database of video recordings obtained through NSA surveillance. The scariest thing about Telling Lies, the new political thriller from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, is that it takes the NSA at its word. One feature is the system’s ability to limit what an analyst can do with a tool… and no analyst can operate freely.” This statement painted a much different picture, assuring the public that tools like XKeyscore “have stringent oversight and compliance mechanisms built in at several levels. Six months earlier, the NSA had issued a press release in response to the publication of classified materials leaked by Snowden. Anybody you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world.” In 2014, the whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke with German broadcaster NDR about a National Security Agency tool known as XKeyscore: “a front end search engine that allows to look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.” According to Snowden, someone with access to the system “could read anyone’s email in the world.