Government Surveillance with A Pinch of Sarcasm

I think it is completely wrong for the government to monitor public communications without the consent of a judge. This was put into the Constitution as a form of checks and balances to prevent abuse. Well I sent an email to some friends of mine about a story regarding the government illegally tapping long distance phone calls to overseas and my notoriously right wing friend responded with the following:

Be careful what you say, the NSA may be eavesdropping on you, ya know, because of your terrorist ties. They've noticed that you've been sending emails to your cousin in Tehran, and noticed the phone calls you've been placing to Damascus. Oh, and the American Jihad 2005 mailing list you subscribe to that's hosted on a home server on an ADSL line in Detroit registered in your uncle Khalil Akbar's name. And they've seen you make online bank transfers to the Islamic Global Charity Fund. You and 99.99999% of all Americans fit this type of profile, which is what they're looking for. They have so many reasons to spend their time spying on you, using up precious space on their costly EMC storage servers, and doing voice pattern analysis of your communications on the $25 million Cray X1 they bought last year (which they upgraded to an X1E this year at a cost of $12 million), and then archive all of your communications data streams to their basketball court sized ADIC tape silos.

They want to spy on every American they can, because they have so many qualified personnel with sooo much idle time on their hands, and a totally limitless IT budget to keep acquiring more and more Cray, Sun, EMC, and IBM hardware and software. They never have budget constraints and cutbacks, or project deadlines. They don't have managers to answer to, asking them why they're wasting 8.37TB of space on their EMC Symmetrix (at a cost of $22,000/Terabyte) storing 2 years worth of digitized phone recordings of your entire extended family tree that resides inside the borders of the US. And the manager isn't questioning why they've spent 4,000 CPU hours on the Cray (at $1000/CPU hour) doing voice print analysis of your family voice data trying to match one of the voices to a known member of Al Qaeda they have on file. No, these NSA folk, they don't live in the real world. They can do whatever they want.

So be careful. They're DEFINITELY spying on YOU.

I love sarcasm and my friend's wit is outstanding but not to be outdone I responded:

My notoriously right wing friend, you could be right. I did dial that wrong number and Muhammad answered. I have probably been monitored ever since. I think they planted a bug in me because whenever the phone rings my butt makes a strange buzzing sound. Sure it could be the nacho cheese but in these trifling times it could be a counter terrorist initiative. I’m not sure how they got it in me but I had a bad feeling about that bidet in McDonalds last week. A bidet in McDonalds........how could I be so stupid?!

This Tuesday (we all get together every Tuesday for dinner) could one of you guys check and make sure there is nothing in there. I'm not trying to "Brokeback Mountain" anybody but I got to be sure they are not listening.

Also, I think there is a hidden camera in one of the bubble lights on my Christmas tree (sorry, in the spirit of political correctness I meant Holiday Tree). The light does not bubble anymore but it flashes. Last night I was unplugging the Holiday Tree in the nude when it flashed before I unplugged it. I figured since I was bent over they were trying to see if the microphone was still implanted in my butt. Man, I'm scared!!!!