mogadonia:
What is Poem for Echelon?
‘Poem for Echelon’ creates different visual-textual structures and randomly inserts key words that Echelon, big internet spy infrastructure is capturing around the internet. User can copy-paste the text and send it in e-mail. Echelon may censor this poem and have some extra unnecessary work. Goal of such action is protest against invading in people private communication by intelligence service also without reason.
User can on the other hand enjoy visual-textual esthetic of the poem. Poem refers to visual poetry and conceptual art.
What is Echelon?
Echelon is the worldwide signals intelligence network run by the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters in collaboration with Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Echelon uses large ground-based radio antennae in the United States, Italy, the UK, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and several other countries to intercept satellite transmissions and some surface traffic, as well as employing satellites to tap transmissions between cities.
Echelon is reportedly capable of interecepting large portions of the world’s communications: phone conversations, email, SMS, faxes, telexes, internet traffic and other communications.
It uses dictionaries to search for keywords that various security services consider to be of interest (a particular station’s dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency’s chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies).
There are publically generated lists of probable Echelon keywords. Ones used in Poem for Echelon are based on list from http://metamute.com/echelonlist.txt
By using them one can make some extra work for Echelon system by flooding the Internet with ‘trigger’ emails. Still Echelon is too sophisticated to respond to simple lists of words. Reportedly, Echelon analyses the grammatical structure of sentences and the context in which keywords arise.
What can I do with Poem for Echelon?
Copy-paste the poem to e-mail and send it.
Why should I do that?
Poem: You can give some extra work to the spy machine.
Police: But why do you do this to us? We are the good guys.
Poem: Oh, yeah. So why do you spy my private communications?
Do you have a reason to believe i will do some harm to someone?
Police: Well... ...ahm... no - this is a question of general, NATIONAL security!!
Poem: So you violate my personal rights to protect me! How nice!
Police: (It gently blushes. It turns away so public don't see it's insulted. Runs to the press.)
We are the best. We newer do outside of the law! We protect you!
Poem: Not true - But even if the law allows violations of personal rights we have to change the law.
Press: This is insulting and immoral. We will not publish that.
...
Poem: So you don't wont me to raise public awareness of the existence of Echelon and systems like it
and of the fact that personal communications may be being monitored?
Police: (Smiles to the press.) Yes i wish. (It turns away from the public and does the opposite.)
See (and send) Poem for Echelon
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