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