In America, the FBI has Carnivore and the NSA, Echelon. Russia's FSB has SORM. All of these projects detect certain keywords and phrases in everyday communications in the name of anti-terrorist surveillance.

In an attempt to thwart these intrusions (or at very least make them less effective), Emacs has included a command to help a paranoid user create false positives:

M-x spook

Loosely based on Yow, the Zippy the Pinhead quote generator (M-x yow), this command inserts fifteen random politically charged words or phrases from spook.lines at the cursor -- for example,

BATF North Korea NSA Delta Force cracking Saddam Hussein Uzi World Trade Center jihad cryptographic plutonium PLO AK-47 Legion of Doom CIA

Included with GNU Emacs 20.7 is the following spook.lines file:

[spook.lines]

This is the same format as zippy's yow.lines file.
Every entry ends in a ascii 0 (control-atsign)
Everything before the first ascii 0 is a comment.
Add your favorite spook phrases here!

$400 million in gold bullion
[Hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance]
AK-47
Albanian
ammunition
arrangements
assassination
BATF
bomb
CIA
class struggle
Clinton
Cocaine
colonel
counter-intelligence
cracking
cryptographic
Delta Force
DES
domestic disruption
explosion
FBI
FSF
fissionable
Ft. Bragg
Ft. Meade
genetic
Honduras
jihad
Kennedy
KGB
Khaddafi
kibo
Legion of Doom
Marxist
Mossad
munitions
Nazi
Noriega
North Korea
NORAD
NSA
nuclear
Ortega
Panama
Peking
PLO
plutonium
Qaddafi
quiche
radar
Rule Psix
Saddam Hussein
SDI
SEAL Team 6
security
Semtex
Serbian
smuggle
South Africa
Soviet
spy
strategic
supercomputer
terrorist
Treasury
Uzi
Waco, Texas
World Trade Center

Of course, an especially wary individual can add their own.

A word with a checkered past

The word spook has traditionally been used as a sort of generic word for creepy creatures that wander about in the darkness—ghosts, bogeymen, ghouls, imps, and that sort of thing. Experts in the field of word origins compare the Norwegian word spjok (ghost—Danish: spøgelse, and in Swedish: spöke) and spiganis (Will-o'-the-wisp or corpse candle).

It is thought that there is a connection between the idea of 'to jest' or 'to scare' and this word. The Danish word spøg can mean 'to frighten someone as a prank.' There may also be a connection between this word and the English word spark.

Somewhere in the early 20th century, Caucasian racists decided to co-opt this term as a slur against blacks. The concept that black people were hard to see at night, thus linking them with evil night-stalking monsters, goes back into the misty past of race relations. The term is well-documented to have been in use since the early 1940s, but I have an earlier attribution for this slur.

In one of the Little Rascals shorts (Spooky Hooky, from 1936), the juvenile protagonists have to go into school after hours to deliver a bogus doctor's note to the teacher's desk so that they can sneak off to the circus the next day. The school proves a scary place after hours, and at one point, Buckwheat (the black child) tells his companions "They's spooks out there!" Causing his friend Spanky to quip "Oh Buckwheat! The only spook out there is you." Ouch. (This episode has since been sanitized, and the offensive line removed, but it is still available if you know where to look.)

Because of the racist overtones, the word fell out of favour, and now is pretty much restricted to the cloak-and-dagger meanings. I have actually seen instances on etymology discussion boards where young people were unaware of the other meaning of the word altogether, which I think is kind of nice.

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References:
Africa Update Archives: http://www.ccsu.edu/Afstudy/upd4-3.html
Snopes.com online "What is the Etymology of the term Spook?" http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=95;t=000880
Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=s&p=36
Dimivew assisted with a bit of linguistic aid
TV.com...I love what you can find out on the web

Spook (?), n. [D. spook; akin to G. spuk, Sw. spoke, Dan. spogelse a specter, spoge to play, sport, joke, spog a play, joke.]

1.

A spirit; a ghost; an apparition; a hobgoblin.

[Written also spuke.]

Ld. Lytton.

2. Zool.

The chimaera.

 

© Webster 1913.