If a Republican Congressman, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Internet civil libertarians are true, it doesn't take a lot beside a few choice words or phrases for the U.S. and at least four other nations to intercept your e-mail, according to a columnist for the New York Post.
"Want to give a big, fat finger to Big Brother today? Fax or e-mail this column to a friend. Be sure to include the following words: Unabomber. Anthrax. Fissionable plutonium. North Korea. Militia. Delta Force. Ruby Ridge," writes Rod Dreher in Thursday's edition of the New York daily.
Dreher says e-mails or faxes containing those words or phrases are often intercepted by a sophisticated official electronic monitoring system known as Echelon.
"Echelon is a super-secret global surveillance network, run by the U.S. National Security Agency, in conjunction with the governments of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand," Dreher continues. "Echelon is said to intercept and sift through countless electronic transmissions daily, filtering out those with particular "keywords" that could signal a security threat. The purloined posts are later analyzed."
In fact, Thursday was set as "Jam Echelon Day," with a group of cyber activists encouraging computer mavens to flood the Net with e-mails containing any or all the suspected keywords, in hope the flood would throttle Echelon computers and satellites.
"The protest is meant to raise public awareness about the threat to privacy and civil liberties purportedly posed by the security network, which sounds like something out of the movie Enemy of the State," Dreher writes.
The NSA neither denies nor confirms Echelon exists, but Dreher says too much has already leaked about it or been uncovered by journalists and investigators "to allow for plausible deniability." Echelon may have been created early in the Cold War as a way for those countries joining in to intercept Soviet Union communications.
But since the Soviet collapse, there is said to be more proof Echelon is now being used worldwide for commercial espionage and snooping non-military targets like private citizens, Dreher says.
And Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, a one-time Central Intelligence Agency official, says he's worried about Americans' rights - enough to want Congressional hearings on the Echelon question.
"My concern is that they are sweeping far too broadly," Barr told Dreher. "I believe that the rights of American citizens are being infringed. The danger is that we have no whatsoever. Whenever you pick up an instrument of communication, you run the risk of the government listening in to you."
And groups crossing ideological lines, such as the ACLU and the conservative Free Congress Foundation, are demanding a similar course.
