telecommunications haystack.

Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the
masses of other calls and digitally recorded to be listened to by analysts
back in the agency headquarters.

The implications of this capability are immense.

The UKUSA agencies can use machines to search through all the telephone calls
in the world, just as they do for written messages.

It has nothing to do with whether someone is deliberately tapping your phone,
simply whether you say a keyword or combination of keywords that is of
interest to one of the UKUSA agencies.


P47
The keywords include such things as names of people, ships, organizations,
countries and subjects. They also include the known telex and phone numbers
and Internet addresses of the individuals, businesses, organizations and
government offices they may want to target.

The agencies also specify combinations of these keywords to help sift out
communications of interest.

For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the
words 'Suva' and 'aid', or cables containing the word 'Suva' but NOT the
word 'consul' (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications).

It is these sets of words and numbers (and combinations of them), under a
particular category, that are placed in the Dictionary computers.

The whole system was dev