Flashback
NSA line eater
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 blocks 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.
The “NSA line eater” is a fictional creation of the USENET era. In the early days of the internet, newsgroup users collectively developed this urban legend that suggested the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was actively monitoring all posts, and that some type of surveillance tool was “eating up” random lines of various messages.
The idea of the NSA line eater emerged because USENET users would occasionally see some lines of posts vanish seemingly at random. They might see text from one post or another cut off in parts. The theory was that NSA monitoring and surveillance software was clipping these random pieces out of USENET postings.
In response to the idea that the NSA was monitoring everybody, users started to form their own defenses. One common practice involved trying to flood or choke the NSA line eater by putting useless anarchic jargon into every post through signature blocks. Users would put words like Palestine, cocaine, assassin or KGB into their signature blocks to add these words every single post.
[Usenet] A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the line eater, and postings often included a dummy line of line eater food