Operation Lucifer

Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a conspiracy theory.

The American National Security Agency (NSA being held really to mean ‘No Such Agency’ or perhaps ‘Never Say Anything’) were said to be reading every e-mail that was sent within, or to or from, the USA.

How did we know this?

Well, you see, the NSA’s computers, despite being very expensive indeed, still weren’t quite fast enough. They had to read every e-mail to search it for keywords, but there were so many that the bandwidth wasn’t quite sufficient for the job.

Which is why e-mails so often arrived with their last lines mysteriously missing. The effect was called the ‘NSA line eater’. People used to reserve the last line of e-mails for something like this:

NSA line eater food: bomb, terrorist, president, asshole, assassinate, immediately

Actually it was a combination of an urban legend and a technical fault (anorak facts from Mondofacto). But that wasn’t as much fun.

Now, it seems, line eater food is back on the menu, but for a different reason. Now we know they’re reading everything, and scanning it for keywords and whatnot, because the swine have the temerity not only to pay themselves with our money to do it but also to brag about it later.

Ian Parker-Joseph (with whom I am back to agreeing) prescribes more or less exactly the antecedent remedy:

The following is a disclaimer and a protest at the collection, retention and sharing of my personal mail by the morally bankrupt state.

By adding a string of key words, it will guarantee that each and every mail that I send will now need to be manually viewed as it is picked up by the auto scan software. If every person in the UK does exactly the same, then the entire system will quickly become so unmanageable, so unwieldy that it will become unworkable.

Key words, bomb, assassinate, president, brown, Osama, Obama, Sargozy, Merkel, government, target, location, rocket, grenade, al-Qaeda, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, UK, America, guns, jets, bombs, machine-gun, terrorists, MP’s, pigs, troughs, France, Germany, Italy, nuclear, Korea.

Any computer fan will instantly recognise that merely copying and pasting this block of text into one’s own e-mails (or, for that matter, blog posts, internet traffic being subject to the same surveillance) will be completely ineffective.

This is because were one to be on the Other Side, one would simply set up a filter, much as one does to recognise spam, which knows this form of words and is set to ignore it. As each person sets up their provocative sig-line, the system will check it once, and then pass it by.

Properly to waste the enemy’s fuel, it has to be different each time.

Mondofacto again:

The GNU version of Emacs actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.

This is far more like what is required, but instead of all resorting to GNU EMACS, which would be rather like abandoning one’s combine-harvester in favour of a McCormick’s Patent Mechanical Reaper, we might instead consider this as a minor challenge to the creative impulse.

For myself I do not believe that any terrorist would ever refer to themselves as a ‘terrorist’ (hence the humour of the briefing scene in Python’s Life of Brian), nor do I believe that they would transmit, en-clair, words to do with their vocation which are normally used only by journalists.

Were this to be a genuine terrorist communication, it might read:

The begonias have come up again, and are looking really rather good this year. We have nine different colours, and there is every sign that they will be in full bloom by the end of the month.

Or even, less cryptically,

Carry out operation Lucifer at 0000 Monday.

But of course there are no genuine terrorists, and the whole thing is just more security-theatre, the real purpose of which is to justify the detection and control of political dissent.

So the exact choice of words is a matter for the creative interpretation of the individual. All that matters is that they are there, and different every time, and persuasively interpretable as in some way ominous.

PFLE, operation Lucifer, protactinium, methyl phosphonyl fluoride, isopropanol, Green Park tube station, volunteers, synchronise, mobile phone, martyrs

Will this do?