Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition

[Anna Balint]

'Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition'
to coincide with Jam Echelon Day 2001.
see http://cipherwar.com/echelon

Total prize money 1000euro
Submission closing date 21 October 2001
Send entries to echelon at metamute.com SMS +44[0]7866830757
Fax/snail see below.

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, including phone conversations, 
email and SMS. It
uses dictionaries to search for keywords that various 
security services
consider to be of interest. Under the ECHELON system, 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.
Each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, 
telexes, emails,
internet traffic and other communications that pass through 
it and
compares them against this list of keywords.

The rationale of Jam Echelon Day was to use publically 
generated lists
of probable Echelon keywords to confuse the system by 
flooding the
Internet with 'trigger' emails and to raise public 
awareness of the
existence of Echelon and the fact that personal 
communications may be
being monitored. A good example can be found at
http://www.c4i.org/erehwon/spookwords.html or French 
site 'bugbrother'
http://www.bugbrother.com/echelon/spookwordsgenerator.html, 
where a more
sophisticated email generator is housed.

One criticism of the Jam Echelon project is that 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. Metamute Meets Echelon has been created to 
motivate the
production of fictional works that use the Echelon 
wordlists with the
degree of sophisticated contextualisation that could 
actually cause the
system to notice and respond. Or at least get seriously 
confused.

Rules

Participants should utilise words from the Echelon 
dictionary
http://metamute.com/echelonlist.txt to produce an original 
literary
work. Any literary genre is admissable - from short stories 
to drama to
poetry to speeches to the epistolary form. Fictional 
company memos and e-
mail exchanges are admissable, as are IRC and SMS 
conversations, or any
other form.

The work produced must not be about Echelon in any way, 
shape or form,
and the term 'Echelon' must not appear anywhere in the work.

1st Prize in the competition is 500 Euros, and two runners 
up will each
receive a prize of 250 Euros each.

http://www.metamute.com/echelon_lit_comp_rules.txt