25 lines
3.3 KiB
HTML
25 lines
3.3 KiB
HTML
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>NSA line eater</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../N.html" title="N"/><link rel="previous" href="NP-.html" title="NP-"/><link rel="next" href="NSP.html" title="NSP"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">NSA line eater</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="NP-.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">N</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="NSP.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="NSA-line-eater"/><dt xmlns="" id="NSA-line-eater"><b>NSA line eater</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to
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be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers used to
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think it was mythical but believed in acting as though existed just in
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case. Since the mid-1990s it has gradually become known that the NSA
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actually does this, quite illegally, through its Echelon program.</p><p>The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like
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‘KGB’, ‘Uzi’, ‘nuclear materials’,
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‘Palestine’, ‘cocaine’, and
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‘assassination’ in their <a href="../S/sig-block.html"><i class="glossterm">sig block</i></a>s in a
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(probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The
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<a href="../G/GNU.html"><i class="glossterm">GNU</i></a> version of <a href="../E/EMACS.html"><i class="glossterm">EMACS</i></a> actually
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has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage
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into your edited text.</p><p>As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of this myth
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involving a ‘Trunk Line Monitor’, which supposedly used speech
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recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This is much harder
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than noticing keywords in email, and most of the people who originally
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propagated it had no idea of then-current technology or the storage,
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signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the
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basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50
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high-school students and just let them listen in.</p><p>Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude later,
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however, there are clear indications that the NSA has actually deployed
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such filtering (again, very much against U.S. law). In 2000, the FBI wants
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to get into this act with its ‘Carnivore’ surveillance
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system.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="NP-.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../N.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="NSP.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">NP- </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> NSP</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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