Kellyanne Conway's Microwave Spying Gaffe

Submission 9,413

Part of a series on Kellyanne Conway. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Kellyanne Conway's Microwave Spying Gaffe refers to a statement made by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, in which she claimed microwaves were being used as surveillance cameras during an interview in early March 2017.

Background

On March 4th, 2017, United States President Donald Trump posted a tweet claiming that Barack Obama issued wiretaps against Trump Tower prior to the November 2016 election (shown below). Within two weeks, the tweet gained over 145,000 likes and 50,800 retweets.^[5]

On March 7th, Wikileaks released the first part of their Vault 7 leak, which contained documents about a “Weeping Angel” program which captured audio from microphones on Samsung smart TVs after being placed in a “Fake-Off” mode. On March 12th, 2017, Conway was interviewed by the North Jersey^[1] newspaper The Bergen Record, during which she described various surveillance technologies she had read about, including "microwaves that turn into cameras," when asked about Trump's wiretap claim (shown below).

Developments

Online Reaction

On March 13th, posts about the microwave gaffe reached the front page of the /r/politics^[2] and /r/nottheonion^[4] subreddits. Meanwhile, Redditor Danger_Peanut submitted a post asking "What is the 'microwave spying' stuff coming from?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[3] Also on March 13th, various Twitter and Instagram users mocked Conway's statements, posting photoshopped pictures of cameras in microwaves.

That evening, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired a comedy sketch in which Colbert talks to Obama inside a microwave (shown below). In less than 24 hours, a YouTube upload of the segment received more than 590,000 views and 2,100 comments.

Conway's CNN Interview

On March 13th, Conway was interviewed on CNN, during which she clarified that she was speaking about surveillance "generally," adding "I’m not Inspector Gadget. I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy" (shown below).

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online reaction to Conway's gaffe, including The Wrap,^[6] Hollywood Life,^[7] Esquire^[8] and Inquisitr.^[9]