What's with the Weird E-mails? / Echelon

[noreastah <noreastah@acadia.net>]

[: hacktivism :]

[Posted widely to folks wondering what's up...]

Hi Folks,

You may have recieved some weird e-mail today, and perhaps are wondering
why. Today was "Jam Echleon Day". Echelon is a government survilence system
designed to monitor global e-mail and phone traffic. It supposedly scans
for keywords or phrases such as "bomb", "FBI", "revolution", "uprising",
"RAF", "socialist", "ALF", "Earth First!", "Waco", etc., etc.

Hundreds (thousands?) of activists/hacktivists sent out e-mails today
containing keywords which they thought might trigger Echelon - the goal
being to overload the Echelon's capacity for monitoring messages.

What it effective?

It terms of overloading Echelon it probably wasn't effective. However if
the goal was to get the word out about Echelon and get people thinking
about their personal privacy, then it may have been.











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