nroff /N'rof/
n. [Unix, from "new roff" (see troff)] A companion program to the Unix
typesetter troff, accepting identical
input but preparing output for terminals and line printers.
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NSA line eater n.
The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes
assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks.
Most hackers used to think it was mythical but believed in acting
as though existed just in case. since the mid-1990s it has
gradually become known that the NSA actually does this, quite
illegaly, through its Echelon program.
The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like
`KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and
`assassination' in their sig
blocks in a (probably futile) attempt 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.
As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of
this myth involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used
speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This
is much harder than noticing keywords in email, and most of the
people who originally propagated it 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. Twenty years and several
orders of technological magnitude later, however, there are clear
indications that the NSA has actually deployed such filtering
(again, very much against U.S. law).