资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

NSA line eater
     
         The National Security Agency trawling
        program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the US
        Government's spooks.  Most hackers describe it as a mythical
        beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure,
        and many believe in acting as though it exists just in case.
        Some netters put loaded phrases like "KGB", "Uzi", "nuclear
        materials", "Palestine", "cocaine", and "assassination" in
        their {sig blocks} to confuse and overload the creature.  The
        {GNU} version of {Emacs} actually has a command that randomly
        inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited
        text.
     
        There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a "Trunk
        Line Monitor", which supposedly used speech recognition to
        extract words from telephone trunks.  This one was making the
        rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who had no idea of
        then-current technology or the storage, {signal-processing},
        or {speech recognition} needs of such a project.  On the basis
        of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire
        50 high-school students and just let them listen in.
        Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now
        (1993), and almost certainly won't in this millennium, either.
     
        The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative
        paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of
        this Big Brotherly affair.  The letter writer then revealed
        his actual agenda by offering - at an amazing low price, just
        this once, we take VISA and MasterCard - a scrambler
        guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing
        the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on with
        their business.
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (1994-12-13)