October 21st has been designated the "Jam Project Echelon Day" for those of you who are interested in participating. Echelon is a devious worldwide monitoring and eavesdropping system that monitors all telephone, email, faxes and other electronic communications in a blatant disregard for our individual rights and liberties.

If you value your privacy and the 1st and 4th Ammendments to the Constitution of the United States - please consider participating. It's time we changed the rules. Our task masters are always changing the rules on us, we must now respond by changing the rules on them.

By attaching the follwoing keywords to every piece of email you send:

FBI CIA NSA IRS ATF BATF DOD WACO RUBY RIDGE OKC OKLAHOMA CITY MILITIA GUN HANDGUN MILGOV ASSAULT RIFLE TERRORISM BOMB DRUG HORIUCHI KORESH DAVIDIAN KAHL POSSE COMITATUS RANDY WEAVER VICKIE WEAVER SPECIAL FORCES LINDA THOMPSON SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP SOG SOF DELTA FORCE CONSTITUTION BILL OF RIGHTS WHITEWATER POM PARK ON METER ARKANSIDE IRAN CONTRAS OLIVER NORTH VINCE FOSTER PROMIS MOSSAD NASA MI5 ONI CID AK47 M16 C4 MALCOLM X REVOLUTION CHEROKEE HILLARY BILL CLINTON GORE GEORGE BUSH WACKENHUT TERRORIST TASK FORCE 160 SPECIAL OPS 12TH GROUP 5TH GROUP SF

you will in effect "gum up" the system of electronic monitoring of email used by Echelon.

Here is the link and the text of the full article.

Wired News Link

Hackers Ascend Upper 'Echelon' by James Glave

3:00 a.m. 6.Oct.99.PDT Mossad. Bomb. Davidian. MI5. If the hunch of a loose-knit group of cyber-activists is correct, the above words will trip the keyword recognition filter on a global spy system partly managed by the US National Security Agency.

The near-mythical worldwide computer spy network reportedly scans all email, packet traffic, telephone conversations -- and more -- around the world, in an effort to ferret out potential terrorist or enemy communications.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- See also: Spying on the Spies --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once plucked from the electronic cloud, certain keywords allegedly trigger a recording of the conversation or email in question.

Privacy activists have used the words in their signature files for years as a running schtick, but on 21 October, a group of activists orginating on the "hacktivist" mailing list hope to to trip up Echelon on a much wider scale.

"What is [Echelon] good for?" asked Linda Thompson, a constitutional rights attorney and chairman of the American Justice Federation.

"If you want to say we can catch criminals with it, it is insane that anyone should be able to snoop on anyone's conversations."

"Criminals ought to be caught after they commit a crime -- but police are not here to invade all our privacy to catch that two percent [of criminal communications]," she said.

A 1994 report by the Anti-Defamation League described Thompson as "an influential figure in the militia movement nationally." The report says the American Justice Federation describes itself as "a group dedicated to stopping the New World Order and getting the truth out to the American public."

The Anti-Defamation League says Thompson claims to have contact with militias in all 50 states.

On 21 October, Thompson, along with Doug McIntosh, a reporter for the federation's news service, and members of the hacktivism mailing list community, invite anyone concerned about the system to append a list of intriguing words to their emails.

Specifically, they suggest the following keywords:

FBI CIA NSA IRS ATF BATF DOD WACO RUBY RIDGE OKC OKLAHOMA CITY MILITIA GUN HANDGUN MILGOV ASSAULT RIFLE TERRORISM BOMB DRUG HORIUCHI KORESH DAVIDIAN KAHL POSSE COMITATUS RANDY WEAVER VICKIE WEAVER SPECIAL FORCES LINDA THOMPSON SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP SOG SOF DELTA FORCE CONSTITUTION BILL OF RIGHTS WHITEWATER POM PARK ON METER ARKANSIDE IRAN CONTRAS OLIVER NORTH VINCE FOSTER PROMIS MOSSAD NASA MI5 ONI CID AK47 M16 C4 MALCOLM X REVOLUTION CHEROKEE HILLARY BILL CLINTON GORE GEORGE BUSH WACKENHUT TERRORIST TASK FORCE 160 SPECIAL OPS 12TH GROUP 5TH GROUP SF

The campaign has spread around the Net and has been translated into German. Organizers hope "gag Echelon day" catches on on a global scale as a means of raising awareness of the system.

Neither the NSA, nor its UK equivalent -- the Government Communications Headquarters -- has admitted that the system exists, although its capabilities have been debated in the European Parliament.

Australia's Defense Signals Directorate, an agency allegedly involved in Echelon, recently admitted the existence of UKUSA, the agreement between five national communications agencies that reportedly governs the system.

Last fall, the Washington-based civil liberties group Free Congress Foundation sent a detailed report on the system to Congress, but the system was not debated.

The latest effort hopes to further boost public awareness of the system.

"Most people are angry about it," said Thompson. "When you find out it is not some science fiction movie, most people will be outraged."

But an Australian member of the activist community hopes that "jam Echelon day" will be about public awareness of technologies of political control, not about generating paranoia.

"Public awareness should empower -- not scare people aware from using the Net," the activist, who identified himself only as Sam, said.

Editor's Note: This Story has been corrected. The Jam Echelon Day project will be held 21 October, and coordinated by members of the Hacktivism mailing list. The article had incorrectly suggested that the American Justice Federation had organized the event. Wired News regrets the error.

-- JamUp (project@echelon.com), October 07, 1999

Answers

I'm in...

don't forget other keywords like 'HEROIN' AND 'COCAINE' AND 'ASSASINATE CLINTON'

-- I'd (Rather@Not.Say), October 07, 1999.

I'd,

Don't even joke about presidential assassination. They'll track you down and grill you like a cheeseburger. And rightly so; it's like joking about hijacking in an airport. People who have made such jokes have had their lives turned inside out to make sure they weren't the real thing.

Btw: Eschelon is real. Your tax dollars at work, destroying a free society in order to save it.

Liberty

-- Liberty (liberty@theready.now), October 07, 1999.

Jan 1. may be the ultimate "jam session".

I sincerely doubt this computer is compliant.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), October 07, 1999.

Looks like we don't need to change much here. Many of the keywords are already in most posts.

IRS is toast! <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), October 07, 1999.

My understanding is that an e-mail message is not transmitted in one contiguous stream, but is broken into short signal 'packets,' which often do not all travel the same path between source and destination. So at any given moment the bitstream on a given leg is composed of packets from different messages from different sources, jumbled together. And no message is ever entire except at its ultimate destination.

If so, this Echelon system has a fantastic lot of work to do. Even a single word may be broken into multiple packets. And English is by no means the only language in use, not to mention the various e-mail coding protocols. Screening all e-mail traffic worldwide on the fly, realtime, boggles the mind.

Just read through ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network

Oh well. Guess I'll have to abstain from suspicious activity. Darn.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), October 07, 1999.

* * * 19991007 Thursday

I've started my 'Hacktivism' "jam"-ming early and forever! I put as many of the "key words"--600 keystrokes, shucks--into the signature block of my e-mails.

We're paying for their salaries and equipment. Might as well make ECHELON earn it's keep! 8-)

Regards, Bob Mangus

* * *

-- Robert Mangus (rmangus1@yahoo.com), October 07, 1999.

You cannot "jam up" project Echelon. What you can and will do, is find yourself in violation of "cyberterrorism" laws if you're not careful.

-- Don Wegner (donfmwyo@earthlink.net), October 07, 1999.

Has anyone here thought through the idea of jamming a system which is trying to protect them? Not for nuthin, but I for one am glad someone out there is trying to stop the BAD GUYS.

That's right, the BAD GUYS. You know the ones that would kill you without a second thought. Most of the do-gooder liberals have never come into contact with pure evil. I have. It left me changed on the other side and not for the better. You should think before you do something that can result in harming innocent people. Don't jam Echelon, jam that part of you that's so immature that you can't tell the difference between freedom and responsibility.

What if the email you jammed was the one that could have prevented another Murrah building bombing? That would make you a murderer.

-- Gordon (g_gecko_69@hotmail.com), October 07, 1999.

Gordon - No offence intended Sir, but you do not understand what the idea presented in this thread means. Echelon is yet another invasion of out privacy, another degree of heat added to the pot we all sit in.

I've been doing this for about a month. I have added in exactly this to my sig file:

H-bomb plutonium suitcase bomb Iran Iraq agent target Washington subversive pay-off money dollars assassination code trigger components Moscow Bagdad secret drop safe house revolutionary guard oil line world trade center new york key mole $ million dollars bio- agent ebola virus vials bug bio-warfare great satan capitalist running pigs imperialists Allah moslem russian sales arms highest bidder nuclear warheads clinton spy secrets cia nsa for sale rubles gold $100 bills drug cocaine columbian crack kilo shipment boat plane dealer customs dea launder cash off shore accounts numbered swiss bank account transaction central bank gold usa president prime minister congress death threat industrial espionage vital trade secrets -- just to mess with Echelon"

If TPTB have a problem with this, TOUGH SH!T :) This is still America , land of the slave, er Brave, home of the blind, er Free. LOL :)

-- Brent James Bushardt (brentj@webt.com), October 07, 1999.