Google NSA's "Echelon" and CARNIVORE. Not too many years ago the NSA were already world wide web levels of notorious for claims that they were monitoring every single cell phone and internet communication, of domestic and unsuspicious Americans, and that those communications were being converted into text by computer, and that the text was being scanned for keywords.
The process involved searching texts or textualized conversions of voice data, for National Security-sensitive keywords like "bomb", "assassinate", "president", and so on. Then these texts were made all lower-case except for the keywords being upper-case (or something like that, who cares) and they were stored and the keywords were tagged onto the files.
Based on how "weighty" the communication appeared to be -- which was calculated using some telemetrics involving the parties involved, the subjects involved, the timing, and the number of keyword phrases included -- the text might be "flagged" and this might get a person watched by the NSA.
So, there was this huge backlash that used the internet to spread the word about Echelon and CARNIVORE and to create support for a movement against it.
The idea was that people would post an overload of messages with keywords in them like "BOMB", "ASSASSINATE", and "PRESIDENT", for the purpose of creating needless and indeed (given that the authors had no motive of making a bomb, or assassinating anyone, let alone the President) senseless work for the CARNIVORE system to churn through.
I can't remember what such buzzword-loaded messages were called. Carnivore Bombs? Something like that?
Anyways, WHERE THE FUCK is all of that historical context when Slashdot authors post new shit or comment on shit about the NSA?
Where your head at?
I'm not upset that this isn't "NEWS". In the strictest sense, the NSA watching *everything you say* isn't news unless you count things that were apparent over ten years ago. But that's not what's upsetting me, right now. Not slashdot's tendency to feature content not quite "news"-worthy, at all.
Instead, I'm upset that the people who submit and comment either have some kind of inability to connect historical events together and keep a relatively sane sense of the importance and relevance and other things that are really REALLY freaking important when you're critically analyzing a situation, or, they're all simply too young.
Too bad there's not a way to realistically age-filter submissions and comments because frankly anything anybody under 25 has to tell me about the NSA is "cool-talk" that has more to do with posturing and meeting some weirded-out hipster status-quo than anything to do with speculation on directions our country is headed, privacy, etc.
It's like the people who, twenty years ago, were still angrily shouting down and taunting anybody who mentioned the "NSA" as paranoid, crazy, schio, etc. ... are today just keeping a low profile and towing the "hip talk" line. Even if not the same individuals, the same personality profile.
They really secretly are like "this is bullshit, this doesn't exist, people who think like this should be zombified and marched into a large oven", but because it's "hip" subject material, they don't really put any thought behind it but hit the "submit" button and are like "hope nobody notices I think they're all batshit crazy."