[michaelcampbell]

Same here; I'm probably MIS-remembering, but I "remember" well before the Snowden leaks reading about the mysterious room at AT&T that was suspected to be where "someone" kept all the equipment for tapping.

IIRC (and I likely don't), what I read was some employee that saw people coming in and out with equipment, some of which he recognized as storage and other data-reading stuff, and a lot he didn't, and he was made VERY aware that he was not to talk about this, or even be in the area any longer or ever again, for any reason.

My recollection was that I did this reading in the mid 90's. But the wikipedia article for that room dates later, so this is the cause of my apprehension of placing the exact time.

[er4hn]

Are you thinking of Room 641A? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[ertian]

There were a few days back in the 90s where all the tech sites would run a campaign where everybody was supposed to send emails full of red flag words: "bomb" and "assassinate" and "terrorism" and what have you. It was specifically to mess with NSA surveillance operations.

[neilv]

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.