NSA line eater

NSA line eater
 n.

   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.
    

NSA line eater

   <messaging, tool> The National Security Agency trawling
   program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the US
   Government's spooks.  Most hackers describe it as a mythical
   beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure,
   and many believe in acting as though it exists just in case.
   Some netters put loaded phrases like "KGB", "Uzi", "nuclear
   materials", "Palestine", "cocaine", and "assassination" in
   their {sig blocks} 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.

   There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a "Trunk
   Line Monitor", which supposedly used speech recognition to
   extract words from telephone trunks.  This one was making the
   rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who 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.
   Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now
   (1993), and almost certainly won't in this millennium, either.

   The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative
   paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of
   this Big Brotherly affair.  The letter writer then revealed
   his actual agenda by offering - at an amazing low price, just
   this once, we take VISA and MasterCard - a scrambler
   guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing
   the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on with
   their business.

   [{Jargon File}]

   (1994-12-13)