Echelon is the worldwide signals intelligence network run by the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters in collaboration with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Reportedly the system is capable of intercepting large portions of the world's communications, including phone conversations, email and SMS. The Jam Echelon Day (21 October) is intended to raise public awareness of the existence of Echelon and stimulate scrutiny of the world's government agencies that operate it. The rationale is to use the publically available list of Echelon keywords to confuse the system by flooding the Internet with emails containing the list. One criticism of the Jam Echelon project is that Echelon is too sophisticated to respond to simple lists of words.

As a response, and to coincide with Jam Echelon Day, Metamute launched a literary competition inviting fictional works that used the Echelon worldlist with the degree of sophisticated contextualisation. Hopefully the entries would actually cause the system to notice and respond. Or at least get seriously confused.

Competition Entries

http://www.metamute.com/mfiles/echelon/index.htm