Remember when M-x spook was a joke?

From the Emacs manual:

35.6 Mail Amusements

M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.

The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA1 and other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (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. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people.

Hee hee. And then there's the Jargon file:

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 illegally, through
its Echelon program.

And now this:

The Department of Homeland Security monitors your updates on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to uncover "Items Of Interest" (IOI), according to an internal DHS document released by the EPIC. That document happens to include a list of the baseline terms for which the DHS -- or more specifically, a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks -- use to generate real-time IOI reports. (Although the released PDF is generally all reader-selectable text, the list of names was curiously embedded as an image of text, preventing simple indexing. We've fixed that below.)

Epic.org info here. Some random keywords, thanks to Animal New York:

• United Nations
• Disaster management
• Security
• Industrial spill
• Public Health
• Telecommunications
• Yuma
• Target
• Earthquake
• China
• Social Media