How the NSA (government) is monitoring you

Yahoo is running an interesting story on the governments electronic surveillance system. Echelon, if you don’t already know, is the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic surveillance system, designed to monitor telephone calls, faxes, and e-mails worldwide. The system looks for words or phrases that could be used by terrorist organizations to plot their next attack. The trouble is, most world-class criminals and terrorists aren’t sending incriminating plain-text e-mails. They’re using other methods to communicate, such as steganography (hiding files within a file).