IS BIG BROTHER
READING YOUR E-MAIL?


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.

If the suspicions of Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), the American Civil Liberties Union
and cyber-libertarian "hacktivists" are correct, your fax or e-mail containing
those words will have been intercepted by a sophisticated official electronic
monitoring system called "Echelon."

Echelon is a supersecret global surveillance network, run by the U.S. National
Security Agency, in conjunction with the governments of Britain, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand.

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.

Hacktivists around the world have scheduled today as "Jam Echelon Day." They're
encouraging computer users to flood the Internet with e-mails containing
suspected keywords, hoping the deluge will short-circuit Echelon's computers
and satellites.

The public will never know if they succeed, but crashing Echelon is not really
the point. The protest is meant to raise public awareness about the threat to
privacy and civil liberties purportedly posed by the security network.


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