Get the tin-foil hats ready because this is a weird one.
Some people may be familiar with ECHELON and PRISM, the NSA's reputed program that monitors e-mail communication with specific keywords. In other words, if a certain list of words crop up in your e-mails on a repeated basis, the NSA will most likely start monitoring you. A couple of years ago, a list surfaced online which purported to be used by the NSA to screen e-mails.
PATRIOT Act, people.
Anyway, while some of the words might be quite obvious - INFOSEC, Intelligence, Rapid Reaction, CQB, M-14, Bletchley Park (it's where the ENIGMA was solved by Alan Turing's team in World War II) - there's one word that sticks out for Irish people.
Leitrim. Yes, really.
Among the many, many words in the so-called NSA keyword list is Leitrim and nobody's really sure why. We checked out every resource we could think of - well, Wikipedia - and couldn't find any military or strategic value to Leitrim.
In fact, Leitrim's Wikipedia page doesn't even list any military headings, although it does point out that character actor Patrick McGoohan was from Leitrim. He starred in '60s paranoia thriller The Prisoner and was Edward Longshanks in Mel Gibson's Braveheart.
Yeah, we can't figure this one out either. It should be stressed that, most likely, the keyword list probably isn't real - or if it was real, it's most likely long outdated and has been severely updated in the interim. The list of word regularly crops up on Reddit when discussing the NSA, so it's entirely possible that it's a hoax or something.
Still doesn't explain what Leitrim is doing on the list, though.
Give us your best conspiracy theory in the comments.
