The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be
reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers used
to think it was mythical but believed in acting as though existed
just in case. Since the mid-1990s it has gradually become known that
the NSA actually does this, quite illegally, through its Echelon
program.
The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like `KGB',
`Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and
`assassination' in their {sig block}s in a (probably futile) attempt
to confuse and overload the creature. The {GNU} version of {EMACS}
actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious
anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.
As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of this myth
involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech
recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This is much
harder than noticing keywords in email, and most of the people who
originally propagated it had no idea of then-current technology or
the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a
project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been
cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in.
Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude later,
however, there are clear indications that the NSA has actually
deployed such filtering (again, very much against U.S. law). In 2000,
the FBI wants to get into this act with its `Carnivore' surveillance
system.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {line eater, the}]