I use the terms “Linux Journal,” “Linux,” and “Penguin” several times in this blog post. I’m sorry to tell that if you’ve been reading this blog post you are probably on the NSA list of extremists. With subversive beginnings and evil intent such as this, naturally the NSA would want to keep an eye on it. The original idea was to allow communications over the internet to be untraceable so sailors (or others) could write home and keep their lips tight (loose lips sink ships and all that). It has also been funded by the US State Department and the National Science Foundation. Tor comes form a project originally funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory and DARPA with early work on it supported by the radical Electronic Frontier Foundation. These are, of course, technologies to be more anonymous on the internet. This is where things like Tor and Tails exist as projects and are mostly used. Kyle Rankin at Linux Journal who is a known Linux user notes that there is a more specific reason the NSA would view the Linux community as a hotbed of potential extremism. Linux Journal is a key publication used by a wide range of Linux extremists, er, users and developers. Linux is a widely used extremely important operating system. We’ve known for years that the NSA snoops on everything and everyone. Stallman added M-x spook to emacs decades ago. Did anyone ever seriously consider the idea that the Linux community and their Penguin friends would not be the subject of special NSA attention? It would be rather disappointing were it not.
I do find it amusing that people are a bit up in arms over this. The adoption of Tux the Penguin as the symbolic mascot of GNU/Linux is a huge red flag for the entire intelligence community. I can’t think of anything more extreme than this. They wear tuxedos, who does that anymore? They live on the Antarctic Continent. If not, they probably use a cousin or hybrid of some sort.Īlso, penguins. I’m sure the NSA itself uses Linux as its primary operating system because it is the most adaptable and secure one they can get. Linux-like operating systems are the preferred systems for devices that need both reliability and security. LAMP systems are the most secure servers used on the Internet, by and large. GNU/Linux, FOSS, OpenSource – these are all keywords I’d be watching because this is where the cutting edge is. If I was the NSA I’d be keeping a close eye on the Linux community because that is where a major national intelligence agency is most likely to find useful, and extremely good, security related ideas. If you visit Linux Journal’s web site, your internet traffic, apparently, is subject to this treatment. If you subscribe to the journal, visit the site, mention it in an email, or anything like that, your internet traffic will be subject to additional special attention.Īpparently the NSA captures all, or very nearly all, of the Internet traffic for just long enough to sort through it for key indicators, which they use to pull out a subset of traffic for longer term storage and possible investigation. As I’m sure every Linux user knows by now, the National Security Agency has included “Linux Journal” (the journal and the site, apparently) as an indicator for potential extremist activity. But this, unfortunately, is not a good example of change over time. It is amazing to see how things change over time. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people. (The agencies say that they don’t, but that’s what they would say.) The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA and other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the term “spook” in those days meant “spy.”) Stallman notes in the current edition of the manual, In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message.
#Journaly linux manual#
By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice.
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