That's right people, the
government is reading your
email, looking at your
usenet posts, watching your homemade
pornography, and an agent is strapped under your
car as you read this, checking your
mileage.
While I don't deny that there is some sort of
electronic surveilance afoot in the
world wide web, the notion that governments are reading every email or post you send that contains words on the list is absurd. Have a look at some of them!:
texas,
captain,
nerd,
rain (no talking about the weather in the new era!),
sex,
porno (Something tells me those poor agents are going to have to do alot of reading (especially the new
Irvine Welsh book)),
fetish,
razor,
tie-fighter (Yeah,
Star Wars geeks pose an enormous threat to international security),
beef (perhaps the
NSA is made up of militant vegetarians) and
fax. That was what I got from a thirty second scan. Understandably, this is just a list from some stupid chainmail (So where the 3C!'s came from I can only guess), but presumably the real list (if there is one) would contain many seemingly obtuse words also.
Perhaps ten years ago a system like Echelon would be feasible, perhaps even useful, but definitely not now. Imagine the staggering amount of emails after
September 11, 2001, all of which would have something to do with discussing acts of terrorism. You think they were all read? There is far too much data containing those sort of words to sort through it all.
"But
Sasha Gabba Hey!! Surely you realise that it's not a few unrelated words that Echelon picks up on, but rather a string or phrase of suspect ones!" I hear you cry. To you I say; "you fool" or maybe; "come to
the Tote on a
Tuesday and I'll
headbutt you in the face" depending on how work is going. On a
mailing list, a message like
Kill the president,
Satellite imagery from Panama is in place to bomb the Sears Tower,
((And so on etc... - About three more paragraphs of 'questionable' text))
Went through in the same amount of time as one saying "hello" - That is, a matter of seconds.
Don't you think that a terrorist organisation would probably try and
encrypt their messages, or at least use some kind of non-obvious codewords to signal their intentions to cohorts? The system might serve to dissuade Bratty Yankshit the third and his tryhard
anarchist friends from trying to set fire to a
McDonalds with
firecrackers, but then again, it probably won't.
Sorry people, but for the most part,
Big Brother definitely isn't watching. And with that, I will work on my plan to assassinate
George W. Bush, mainly because he's a idiot and uses a
four wheel drive. If I disappear, please delete this writeup as I will have been disproven.