Touch Tone exposes the strange landscape of Spook Country

[Administrator]

Samir Jilani: smart, Iranian and a Muslim. According to the security service depicted in Touch Tone, that's practically an admission of guilt. It's definitely reason enough to start reading his private emails and texts. I should know. I'm the one who's been reading them.
Touch Tone is a puzzle game about abusing other people's privacy, and its tutorial teaches you a lot more than just how the puzzles work. It teaches you about the, well, tone of the whole thing: the skewed reality its unfolding narrative will drop you into. It does this by setting you a few simple tester tasks. Hack a few messages. Read them. Now, which of them is worthy of future investigation?
Here are a couple of Wall Street types dealing in dodgy bonds. Post 2008, I took a pretty dim view of this, and so I flagged it for the feds. Wrong answer, says Touch Tone: Wall Street types are just doing their thing. It's the economy, stupid. Keep moving.
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