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From: Karl.Kleinpaste@cbstr1.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: "NSA food" and other silliness
Message-ID: <210@cbstr1.att.com>
Date: Wed, 8-Apr-87 18:42:29 EST
Article-I.D.: cbstr1.210
Posted: Wed Apr  8 18:42:29 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Apr-87 08:27:20 EST
Sender: karl@cbstr1.att.com
Followup-To: don't bother
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Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.1 of Mon Mar 30 1987 on cbstr1 (usg-unix-v)

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that the supposed "NSA food" (just one
of its many titles) that people have started tacking onto their
.signatures is of absolutely no value?

Consider the following trivial algorithm:
[1] Grep articles for some appropriate set of NSA-interesting
keywords, including (say) CIA KGB ammunition John Birch NSA FBI
AK-47 communist nuclear and anything else you care to include that you
think the NSA would like to know you're writing about.
[2] For all lines in which such strings are found, check to see if > 2
of them can be found.  Or perhaps 3, or 4.
[3] Reject all such lines (and hence all such articles) as articles
obviously intending to confuse/overload the NSA or other news-watching
government body.
[4] For all rejected articles, perform a secondary backhand test to
see if there are lines containing an average of less than 2 such
references, in order to catch those who actually *are* discussing
security-related topics, but are hiding them in "NSA food" articles.

Result: All articles containing "NSA food" are being ignored by the
NSA - specifically *because* they contain NSA food.  All articles,
that is, except for those in which the NSA actually has an interest -
specifically *because* they contain NSA food.

"NSA food" .signatures are in the same class as opinion disclaimers
and restricted distribution exclusion clauses, i.e., utterly
worthless, and adding to the network load.

Could people please stop using them?

Karl