NSA line eater

NSA line eater n.  The National Security Agency trawling
   program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the
   U.S. 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 block}s 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.

   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.