Kevin Malin scooped up the mail that had dropped into his garage through a slot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He glanced at the June 2004 cover of Reason, the libertarian magazine he subscribed to,[3] and felt his stomach clench. His name was printed in large type above an aerial photograph of his own neighborhood, a dark red circle drawn around what appeared to be near his house. "At first glance, I read 'Kevin, they're out to get you,'" he told Newsday.[4] He soon changed his mind. The magazine, he decided, was "really neat."[4]
In June 2004, Reason magazine mailed each of its 40,000 print subscribers a unique cover featuring a satellite photograph of their neighborhood with their actual house circled in red.
The operation took months. Nick Gillespie, Reason's editor-in-chief, said a team of a dozen people spread across six states coordinated the project with direct marketing firm Entremedia, Belgian digital printer Xeikon, and the satellite imaging company AirPhotoUSA.[2] Each copy of the magazine carried a different aerial image, a different address, different neighborhood demographics, and different customized advertising on the back cover.[1] More than 40,000 unique editions in a single print run. Another 15,000 or so nonsubscribers got the generic version, a photograph of Gillespie's own house in Oxford, Ohio.[2]
The cover read: "They Know Where You Are!" Inside, subscribers found their own neighborhood data: population, median income, median age, the number of children being raised by grandparents, how many of their neighbors held college degrees.[2] The postal carrier carried that information straight from public databases and dropped it on the kitchen table.
Gillespie's editor's note opened with a photograph of his own home, aerial and circled, and a confession: the databases were already public. The same ZIP code data that let banks approve mortgages without meeting the borrower now let the magazine paint a portrait of a subscriber's block, and he wanted readers to feel it in their own hands before they decided it was a bad idea.[2] His note ended with a shrug: "We may have kissed privacy goodbye, and good riddance, too."[2]
A former Reason writer said the mail clerks at his local post office wanted to keep his copy because their own post office appeared in the aerial photograph on the cover.[4] Other subscribers told the Los Angeles Times they were "freaked out" by the surveillance imagery arriving uninvited.[4]
Gillespie called the whole operation a nifty experiment and a promotional opportunity.[2] He had circled his own house first. He put the photo on the generic issue, mailed the red circle to himself, and then pointed the same technology at every other address on the subscription list. A decade before Snowden and the NSA, a libertarian magazine demonstrated what public databases already knew about forty thousand people by dropping the evidence into their own garages, one edition at a time, each address circled in red.
