'Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition'

[Claudia Westermann]

Metamute.com, announcement 4 September 2001, contact echelon at metamute.com
http://www.metamute.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=44&forum=1

'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 the publically available list 
of Echelon keywords to confuse the system by flooding the Internet with 
emails containing the list and to raise public awareness of the existence 
of Echelon and the fact that personal communications may be being monitored.

One criticim 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 wordlist 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.

Judges' criteria
Entries will be judged against two key criteria: 1) the literary merit of 
the piece of work and 2) the number of words from the Echelon word list 
that are present in the work.

Both criteria are given equal weight. For example, a piece with good 
literary merit and fewer Echelon keywords will not necessarily lose to a 
weaker piece that contains more keywords. Indeed, where it is felt that the 
overuse of words from the Echelon wordlist has actively impaired the 
literary quality, entries will be marked down. Simple lists of keywords in 
an entry will automatically disqualify it.

'Literary merit' is decided by the judges, and their decision is final.

Conditions
1. Entries must be received by 21st October 2001. Entries may emailed to 
echelon at metamute.com, posted to Mute Magazine, 2nd Floor East, Universal 
House, 88-94 Wentworth St., London E1 7SA. Faxed to +44 [0] 20 7377 9520 or 
SMS +44 [0]7866830757. Entries will be accepted either on paper or as 
digital media.
2. Entrants may submit multiple entries up to a maximum of 10 in total.
3. The upper word limit for entries is 2,500 words. Any entries over this 
length (i.e, 2501 words or more) will be automatically disqualified.
4. Metamute reserves the right now or in the future to publish entires in 
any form.
5. Entries must be entirely fictional.

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END

text version available at http://www.metamute.com/echelon_lit_comp_rules.txt
word list available at
http://www.metamute.com/echelonlist.txt