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)