I sent this email yesterday to the people with email accounts on our server at work. It’s an April Fool gag I recycled from a couple years ago at another workplace. I modified it a bit to fit the context.
To all staff,Over the weekend, on Saturday, April 1, we will be implementing a text-screening program on our mail server. This is being done to comply with a provision of the USA Patriot Act and is intended to help combat domestic terrorism. We only learned of this requirement recently, so I apologize for not providing a lot of advance notice.
The process will scan incoming and outgoing emails for content and will redirect “flagged messages” to the National Security Administration’s Cyberterrorism unit. The system will scan messages for certain words and phrases that have been deemed “likely to refer to acts of domestic or international terror, and/or signal criminal activity.”
The application behaves similar to a “junk mail” filter, except that you will receive no notice if email has be re-routed to the NSA. After review, if the NSA deems there is no threat, the message will be routed to its intended recipient. The NSA claims the turnaround time for the analysis to be no more than 5-7 business days.
The full details of the text strings being searched for are not know (for obvious security reasons), but, to give you an idea, a (partial) list of words and phrases used by the NSA’s ECHALON system is as follows:
[redacted: a long list of “spook” words, random French words, and names of people I work with (such as my boss) mixed in]
For those of you who are interested, the program we’re using is called the Advanced Parsing and Reporting Information Lister (APRIL) which is written in the Fortran Object-Oriented Language (FOOL).
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
