Anyone remember

If you been around the Intertubz long enough to know what the Jargon File is, then you’ll surely remember the rumors surrounding a program named Carnivore. Supposedly, the NSA had a sort of “super Carnivore” (known as the “line eater”) that trolled through the entire Intertubz full of emails, Usenet posts and so on searching for key words that might indicate some nefarious doings. Most people considered it unlikely based on the (then) seemingly huge amount of data to be scanned and the state of computing power available.

So here we are, nearly in 2012, andthe rumor is back, this time with the Department of Homeland Security Theater as the star.

And it seems a lot more likely this time around. It may be time to dust off that old Echelon key words and get it updated so we can all start salting a few of them through each email, forum posts and so on–just so the line eater doesn’t go hungry. Hey–maybe I finally found a use for the blogger feature “labels for this post”!

Of course, I don’t think I’m going to need to do it with this post. Excuse me, there’s a knock at the door…. 🙂