Project FOUL BALLS was a counterintelligence PsyOp by National Security Agency (NSA) and their contractor Hooch Toolman Jefferson, Inc.. The leaked documents, revealed in the Snowden Leaks of 2013, described enormous government overreach in domestic surveillance. They were completely fabricated in an attempt to scare the public (particularly those with security clearances) into practicing greater Information Hygiene.
Project FOUL BALLS was exposed by a whistleblower in 2025, but no one really cared.
Context
The Military-Industrial Complex had been expanding steadily for a long time: by 2014, about 4-5 million US residents had a security clearance of some kind. Almost a third of them worked for private companies, not directly for the government. The advent of the SmartPhone led to an exponential increase in the number and variety of electronic communications per person. All of these factors created a nightmare scenario for counterintelligence efforts that threatened to overwhelm their capacity to monitor communications and intercept the worst leaks.
It is important to know that the bread and butter of espionage is made of small bits of information from various low-rank or even public sources. While intelligence agencies do hope for a goldmine trove of top-secret documents only accessible to a high-ranking official, it's much more practical to assemble the different pieces of the puzzle via the much more common leaks of the small fish: a junior engineer brags on Tinder about a new jet engine he's working on; chemistry graduates with a distinct constellation of specialties are being recruited to a particular contractor; employees complain about one department that doesn't seem to do anything at all but gets budget increases every year; a senator wins an unlikely bid for a contractor's new facility (at the same time introducing new legislation that relaxes his state's documentation requirements for toxic waste disposal). These clues, useless on their own, are assembled into a greater picture that tells an observer what is being worked on and where.
So in sum, this confluence of factors led to an extraordinarily leaky society that had to be kept under control. Encryption and training could only do so much for a society that practically lived on the internet. And actually monitoring this volume of information in any effective way was technologically impossible, since what might be considered intel could be defined so broadly. So a plan was hatched to make people think that they were being watched at all times.
Execution
Beginning in 2009, National Security Agency (NSA) drew up plans to convince the public that their every communication was monitored, since actually doing so was out of the question at the time.
They considered releasing an official disclosure, but when this information was tested through a few trial runs of rumor in closed social media groups, American citizens generally had underwhelming reactions, to include: "Boring," "Whatever I guess," "Is that like the government?" and "My NeoPets are fine, right?"
Instead, NSA decided on orchestrating a whistleblower leak and public scandal. This would outrage the public, if enough of the media told them that they should be outraged. They coordinated in secret with Hooch Toolman Jefferson to arrange for an employee with "exceptional moral fiber" to encounter egregious oversteps in surveillance and leak them to the public.
A single position was created with fake workflows and curated access to the documents intended to be leaked. This ensured that no actual secrets would be put at risk, and the NSA would have complete control over the disclosure. An entire team was devoted to interfacing with this position to give it the appearance of an actual job. To their frustration, a total of 22 people occupied this position without even raising a question to their supervisors. NSA started adding even more egregious documentation to the intended leak in hopes of spurring a whistleblower to action, but to no avail.
Eventually, Edward Snowden was put in the position and proved himself a suitable Patsy. Evidently, Project FOUL BALLS was a success, as it scared the public into patterns of increased information hygiene while using their smartphones. According to NSA metrics the number of leaks dropped by over 80%.
The Snowden Leaks Leaks
In 2025, a whistleblower released documents to various international media sources documenting Project FOUL BALLS. No one seemed to notice.