When the Snowden spying scandal broke, I came up with a joke app idea: Patriot Chat would be a secure chat app that would encrypt all communications using peer to peer protocols, with a twist 1/
The twist was that it would also encrypt the messages with a set of trusted keys, from the NSA so the government could easily spy on you. 2/
The idea was to pitch this parody on Colbertian terms and pretending there was nothing wrong with it and it was your patriotic duty to use it. 3/
The joke evolved: I would franchise this and sell access not only to the NSA but to every agency interested, MI6, FSB, KGB, whoever hasn’t money could buy it - after all, we are keeping citizens safe. 4/
To succeed on the marketplace I figured a collaboration with the US government was worth it: use the app, earn points, exchange for goods like less groping at airports, license renewal, TSA pre and so on. 5/
Of course to earn more points you could allow Patriot Chat to upload all your pictures, address book, consent to location tracking and so on. More points, more services. 6/
Everyone knows that there is nothing more patriotic in America than using your hard earned dollars to buy stuff. And nothing more patriotic than purchasing Patriot Points - as in-app purchases of course. A classic win-win 7/
I kept telling this joke to people and enjoyed it. Until one day I had a chance to actually perform my joke on stage: I could build the app as an excuse to show our technology at the Microsoft Build Conference (in 2015)
So we went and built this app. Until Nat got cold feet: would it be appropriate to make a political statement with Patriot Chat at our partner conference? Sounded like a bad idea. N/
We had already started and I loved the flow of the talk. Didn’t want to give it up. So we settled on rebranding the app. It was called “Kinder Chat” - parents played the role of the NSA and kids were the citizens. 10/
We showcased assorted Xamarin capabilities, and I did the neutered joke with @JamesMontemagno on stage at Build. If you squinted just right you could see references to PatriotChat in the code 11/
We open sourced the code, and left a few hints about its origin in the docs and app: github.com/xamarin/Kinder… 12/
You can watch the session, some surveillance jokes survived channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2… 13/
Sadly, after the talk, this surreal idea became real in China- track citizens behavior via points, and give or take benefits based on it. What started as a rumor became the norm. 14/
