File: bruce.el.html

This program was written to protest the miss-named "Communications Decency Act of 1996. This Act bans "indecent speech", whatever that is, from the Internet. For more on the CDA, see Richard Stallman's essay on censorship, included in the etc directory of emacs distributions 19.34 and up. See also https://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html.

For many years, emacs has included a program called Spook. This program adds a series of "keywords" to email just before it goes out. On the theory that the NSA monitors people's email, the keywords would be picked up by the NSA's snoop computers, causing them to waste time reading your meeting schedule notices or other email boring to everyone but you and (you hope) the recipient. See below (I left in the original writeup when I made this conversion), or the emacs documentation at https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/.

Bruce is a direct copy of spook, with the word "spook" replaced with the word "bruce". Thanks to "esr", whoever he, she or it may be, this conversion was an extremely easy piece of editing, suitable for a first essay at elisp programming.

You may think of the name as having been derived from a certain Monty Python routine. Or from Lenny Bruce, who opposed censorship in his own inimitable way. Bruce does exactly what Spook does: it throws keywords into your email messages or other documents.

However, in order to comply with the CDA as interpreted by Richard Stallman (see the essay on censorship), bruce is distributed without a data file from which to select words at random. Sorry about that. I believe the average user will be able to come up with a few words on his or her own. If that is a problem, feel free to ask any American teenager, preferably one who attends a government school. Failing that, you might write to Mr. Clinton or Ms Reno or their successors and ask them for suggestions. Think of it as a public spirited act: the time they spend answering you is time not spent persecuting someone else. However, do ask them to respond by snail mail, where their suggestions would be legal.

To build the data file, just start a file called bruce.lines in the etc directory of your emacs distribution. Note that each phrase or word has to be followed by an ascii 0, control-@. See the file spook.lines in the etc directory for an example. In emacs, use c-q c-@ to insert the ascii 0s.

Once you have edited up a data file, you have to tell emacs how to find the program bruce. Add the following two lines to your .emacs file. Be sure to uncomment the second line.

for bruce mode
(autoload 'bruce "bruce" "Use the Bruce program to protest the CDA" t)

Shut down emacs and fire it up again. Then "M-x bruce" should put some shocking words in the current buffer.

Please note that I am not suggesting that you actually use this program to add "illegal" words to your email, or any other purpose. First, you don't really need a program to do it, and second, it would be illegal for me to suggest or advise that you actually break the law. This program was written as a demonstration only, and as an act of political protest and free expression protected by the First Amendment, or whatever is left of it.

We now return to the original writeup for spook:

Steve Strassmann <straz@media-lab.media.mit.edu> didn't write the program spook, from which this was adapted, and even if he did, he really didn't mean for you to use it in an anarchistic way.

To use this:
 Just before sending mail, do M-x spook.
 A number of phrases will be inserted into your buffer, to help
 give your message that extra bit of attractiveness for automated
 keyword scanners. Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!

Defined variables (2)

Defined functions (2)

Defined faces (0)