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nsa line eater
(foldoc) | NSA line eater
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)
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nsa line eater
(jargon) | 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.
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