Brian M Downing
In recent days we have learned of the secretive National Security Agency’s engagement in data-mining the Verizon system. Yesterday we learned that NSA was doing the same in a few other cyberplaces, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. I can only wish that the NSA data-miners have the same working conditions and good health as coal miners in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania or Wales.
I tried to imagine why the NSA and kindred Guardians of our security and well-being and personal lives would engage in such activities. I realize of course that this is none of my business and that I should simply trust these Guardians, who have spent four trillion dollars on fighting al Qaeda over the last twelve years which has ably contributed to quintupling AQ’s size and reach. All the more reason for more data-mining and more Guardians, no?
But I think I happened across a more basic reason for the Guardians’ foray into our calls to loved ones and eBay watch list. It came to me while recalling an inspiring if insipid patriotic speeches of the last twelve years. The Guardians are intruding on our personal lives because:
They Hate Our Freedoms.
That’s it! The Guardians look down from their glass towers in Laurel and Langley and Arlington and see the repugnant sight of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, exercise free speech, and engage in suspicious acts that the Founding Fathers unwisely entrusted us with and foolishly specified in a public document. Fortunately, that document is largely forgotten now.
From the perspective of our Guardians, there is nothing more worrisome than the sight of people discussing matters such as ongoing wars and the drone program without proper supervision. What would come next? Peaceful assembly? Opposition to the quartering of troops? Smart-alec satire?
Yes, I’ve divulged here the locations of our Guardians’ base camps in the DC area – Laurel and Langley and Arlington, for those whose short-term memory is about as good as mine.
Now, where was I? Oh yes.
Now that the DC area has been compromised, I suggest we find a new place for our Guardians to guard from. North Waziristan has certain advantages: it’s far from the prying eyes of the media, there’s an exotic foreign culture to learn from, and it would place the Guardians nearer to the people they purport to be guarding us from. That’s Al Qaeda, in case the Guardians who are reading this have lost sight of that and think we are at war with the Pashtun, Tuareg, Alawi, Chechen, Iranian, Moro, Romulan, eastern Yemeni, eastern Libyan, and northern Nigerian people.
On the other hand, the Guardians might find North Waziristan to be too cold in winter and its nights marred by irksome buzzing sounds overhead and intermittent loud noises. I think now of a more tropical climes, perhaps in the Caribbean. Wait! The eastern tip of Cuba! Yes, there are hospitable facilities on a military base that Spain magnanimously granted us back in 1898, after some admittedly tense negotiations. And by chance, it’s not far from the location of one our Guardians’ stupendous feats of the Cold War – the Bay of Pigs invasion. Boy, those were the days!
© 2013 Brian M Downing