Metamute meets Echelon literary competition, 2001 Commissions & Prizes

In the summer of 2001, Mute publisher Simon Worthington was offered an anonymous donation of euro1000 for the magazine. The donor's caveat was that we use the money to engage with the issue of surveillance, with Echelon being the cause du jour at the time. The result was a humorous literary competition whose call for submissions says it all... Winners were announced and featured in Mutella No. 10, 2002.

Call for Submissions

07.09.2001 :: AM

'Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition'
To coincide with Jam Echelon Day 2001.

'Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition' to coincide with Jam Echelon Day 2001.

Metamute, the online branch of Mute magazine, is announcing a literary competition, where authors are required to use the Echelon keywords for information filtering in a literary text. The total prize money is 1000 Euro.

Total prize money 1000euro
Submission closing date 21 October 2001
Send entries to echelon@metamute.com SMS +44[0]7866830757

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. Echelon uses large ground-based radio antennae in the United States, Italy, the UK, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and several other countries to intercept satellite transmissions and some surface traffic, as well as employing satellites to tap transmissions between cities.

Echelon is reportedly capable of interecepting large portions of the world's communications, including phone conversations, email and SMS. It uses dictionaries to search for keywords that various security services consider to be of interest. Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. Each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, emails, internet traffic and other communications that pass through it and compares them against this list of keywords.

The rationale of Jam Echelon Day was to use the publically available list of Echelon keywords to confuse the system by flooding the Internet with emails containing the list and to raise public awareness of the existence of Echelon and the fact that personal communications may be being monitored.

One criticim of the Jam Echelon project is that Echelon is too sophisticated to respond to simple lists of words. Reportedly, Echelon analyses the grammatical structure of sentences and the context in which keywords arise. Metamute Meets Echelon has been created to motivate the production of fictional works that use the Echelon wordlist with the degree of sophisticated contextualisation that could actually cause the system to notice and respond. Or at least get seriously confused.

Rules
Participants should utilise words from the Echelon dictionary http://metamute.com/echelonlist.txt to produce an original literary work. Any literary genre is admissable - from short stories to drama to poetry to speeches to the epistolary form. Fictional company memos and e-mail exchanges are admissable, as are IRC and SMS conversations, or any other form.

The work produced must not be about Echelon in any way, shape or form, and the term 'Echelon' must not appear anywhere in the work.

1st Prize in the competition is 500 Euros, and two runners up will each receive a prize of 250 Euros each.

Judges' criteria
Entries will be judged against two key criteria: 1) the literary merit of the piece of work and 2) the number of words from the Echelon word list that are present in the work.

Both criteria are given equal weight. For example, a piece with good literary merit and fewer Echelon keywords will not necessarily lose to a weaker piece that contains more keywords. Indeed, where it is felt that the overuse of words from the Echelon wordlist has actively impaired the literary quality, entries will be marked down. Simple lists of keywords in an entry will automatically disqualify it.

'Literary merit' is decided by the judges, and their decision is final.

Conditions

1. Entries must be received by 21st October 2001. Entries may emailed to echelon@metamute.com, posted to Mute Magazine, 2nd Floor East, Universal House, 88-94 Wentworth St., London E1 7SA. Faxed to +44[0] 20 7377 9520 or SMS +44 [0]7866830757. Entries will be accepted either on paper or as digital media.

2. Entrants may submit multiple entries up to a maximum of 10 in total.

3. The upper word limit for entries is 2,500 words. Any entries over this length (i.e, 2501 words or more) will be automatically disqualified.

4. Metamute reserves the right now or in the future to publish entires in any form.

5. Entries must be entirely fictional.

--
THE LIST
The official competition word list

Metamute.com, announcement 4 September 2001, contact
echelon@metamute.com

'Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition'
to coincide with Jam Echelon Day 2001. see
http://cipherwar.com/echelon

START

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