Furby Alert: when a toy frightened the United States intelligence services

In early 1997, Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung, two product developers who met working at Mattel, attended the International Toy Fair in New York.

There they saw for the first time an artifact that impressed them.

It was the Tamagotchi, the then new virtual pet, which the Japanese inventor Aki Maita had developed and Bandai had begun to market.

The concept behind that toy seemed brilliant to them.

However, they found a problem that seemed fundamental to them: you couldn't hug or pet your Tamagotchi.

After that discovery, Hampton returned to his workshop and began to think about a new toy that, taking the Japanese invention as a starting point, would be a little easier to love.

The name he gave to the new invention was Furball, although he soon shortened it to Furby.

"It all started by writing a kind of script that described some of its characteristics, such as 'if you pet it, it purrs,'" he explained a few years later to

The New York Times

.

He also created a language for the doll, Furbish: a mix of all the languages ​​Hampton knew during the years he had spent in the United States Navy.

Among the strange vocabulary of the Furbys you can trace words that come from Japanese, Thai, Chinese or Hebrew.

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With the help of Chung and a bunch of cables, sensors and simple circuits, they shaped the Furby's guts, which they then covered with a colorful stuffed animal - just as its name promised - with huge round eyes and a yellow beak.

That first prototype, a little smaller than the final product and much more unsightly, can be seen in a video interview that Chung gave in 2014.

Everything went very quickly from then on.

Tiger Electronics, a subsidiary of the multinational Hasbro, bought the patent and the product went on sale in October 1998, a few months before Christmas.

After a powerful advertising campaign that highlighted the novelty of the new toy, the Furby was presented to the public at the famous New York toy store FAO Schwarz, the one where Tom Hanks danced on a giant piano in the movie

Big

.

The launch could be described as a total success, but we would definitely be falling short.

At the end of the first week of the exhibition at FAO Schwarz, orders already amounted to 35,000 units.

An impressive figure that came to nothing in the following three months, as the figure skyrocketed to 1.8 million units sold.

In 1999, sales reached 14 million.

Although it is quite daring to venture to say what the secret of its success was, what is clear is that its creators were wise enough to combine toys that had been children's favorites for years, such as teddy bears and talking dolls, and update them for the 21st century.

In some way, the Furby satisfied a certain need, among children and parents, for the future to arrive now.

The year 2000 was close and, although everything was quite similar to how it had always been, the democratization of the Internet had made us dream of a new present.

The Furby, rudimentary as it was, seemed to have what was beginning to be called “artificial intelligence.”

Furthermore, without awakening the feeling of the uncanny valley, it allowed us to connect and feel a kind of intimacy with the technology that, although in the Tamagotchi it was already outlined in a more distant form, planted children and their parents in the future.

It was the closest thing you could find to one of those robots from science fiction movies, but you could also hug it, it was adorable, fun and it only cost $35.

Furby and the National Security Agency

The story of the Furby's launch can be fascinating on its own.

But perhaps it is even a little more so if we pay attention to a curious incident that occurred at Christmas 1998 and in which the National Security Agency of the US Government, the NSA, was involved.

The first news about it appeared on January 12, 1999 in

The Washington Post

.

The article, shamelessly humorous in tone and titled

A Toy Story of Hairy

Espionage

,

explained how, in the face of all the rumors and exaggerations that had been circulating about the capabilities of Furbys—especially that they could repeat what they heard—the US Government's information agency had decided to launch a Furby alert among its employees and prohibit them from taking them to work.

The newspaper cited an alleged memo that had been circulated internally at the agency that read: “Personally owned photography, video and audio recording equipment is prohibited.

This includes toys, such as Furbys [they were also called Fropie's in the documents], with built-in recorders, which repeat the audio with synthesized sound to imitate the original signal.

It is prohibited to bring these items into NSA spaces.”

The launch of Furby was a total success.

At the end of the first week of the exhibition, orders already amounted to 35,000 units.

An impressive figure that came to nothing in the following three months, as the figure skyrocketed to 1.8 million units sold.

In 1999, sales reached 14 million.New York Daily News Archive (NY Daily News via Getty Images)

The

Post

article continued: “It's hard to imagine [the Furbys] divulging state secrets, but who knows more about eavesdropping than the NSA, which intercepts electronic messages around the world using satellites and other highly secret means?

(…) NSA officials were worried, according to a Capitol Hill source related to the intelligence service, 'that people would take them home and start revealing classified information.'

Tiger Electronics had to come forward to this news to affirm that the Furbys did not have recording systems nor were they capable of repeating any type of information.

Although it seemed that little by little they were learning to speak, it was all an illusion: they began speaking exclusively in their language, but they were programmed so that, as the days went by, they would say more and more words in English or any other language. languages ​​in which they were programmed.

They didn't learn anything, they only gave the impression of learning.

Recently, this curious confusion has come to light again due to the request for information about it from an anonymous citizen who responds to the name @dakotathekat on the social network X. In compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, the NSA He sent him a large amount of information where you can read all the conversations that the agency's agents had regarding the case.

Chains of emails in which there is speculation, with great freedom and very little information, about the artificial intelligence of the dolls, their communication and recording capabilities, and which do not exactly leave them in a very good position due to mistrust and fear they reflect.

I have acquired the fabled NSA "FURBIE ALERT" memo.

I have a significant amount of documentation that came back on an FOIA and I'll be scanning it in the coming days.

Stay tuned.

pic.twitter.com/Fyo04dm4Oo

— (da)kota/the/Kæt (@dakotathekat) January 22, 2024

The documents end, once the article had been published in the

Post

, with a message in which a commander demands his colleagues to stop speculating on the subject immediately.

Perhaps for fear that the agency would be made to look ridiculous if, at some point in the future, these conversations came to light, as they finally did.

An ancestral fear of technological innovations

After 25 years, that fear of a toy by the world's most important security agency may seem ridiculous and unfounded.

And maybe it was.

However, it is also possible that we are sinning from a certain superiority that is not entirely founded.

The fear of technological innovations, technophobia, has been with us for centuries.

Although there are cases in the ancient world - such as people who rejected the printing press in the 15th century - perhaps the first important example was the English Luddites: a group of anti-technology workers who, between 1811 and 1816, denounced that the new machines steam engines were taking away their jobs and, in the middle of the British Industrial Revolution, they carried out sabotage actions in industrial or agricultural machines and workshops.

The rapid technological advance of the 19th and 20th centuries only increased cases of technophobia.

Virtually every important technological advance has had its detractors: from the railway to electricity, through the telephone, automobiles, television or the uses of radioactivity.

Ave Hampton, co-creator of Furby, with his wife Cindy and sons James and Mark, each with their Furby, in a photograph taken in 1998.Paul Harris (Getty Images)

This is a terrain that has been very fertile for the creation of fictions.

An early example of this is

Frankenstein

, the novel by Mary Shelley, but there are many more, especially in the world of cinema: from Fritz Lang's

Metropolis

to

The Omega Man

,

Blade Runner, Terminator, The Matrix

or

WALL-E

.

But technophobia is perhaps currently experiencing its golden age due to new scientific advances that seem to call into question many of the pillars of our civilization that we considered immovable.

This is the case, of course, of artificial intelligence and its possible effects at work.

A fear that connects us directly with the Luddites, but also with the Furby alert.

It is easy to laugh at a lot of clueless gentlemen who in 1999 were not even sure what the name of that new hoarse-voiced doll that they feared could destabilize the Clinton administration.

But you could say that that Furby alert was nothing more than another chapter, perhaps one of the funniest, in our long relationship with technophobia.