Edited sentence: In the early 1990s when the Internet was virtually unknown, he became the target of a USENET prank.It has been suggested that attitudes towards Brother Jed and his style can be used as a measure of one's commitment to freedom of speech.Readers were instructed to go up to him and say "the machine is watching you" on any campus on which he appeared.The prank was ruined when one USENETer explained the whole thing to Brother Jed—later posting, "sorry if I ruined anything"