Spying? OK. Helping Them Spy? Not So Much.
Friday, November 16th, 2007
The government likes being able to listen in on our phone calls. It helps them help us feel safer, see? But to do so, sometimes they need a little help from your friendly local telephone monopoly, which is kind of a problem for some people. Those people sued the phone companies for helping the government make sure that you’re not a vicious terrorist, like you have the right to privacy or something. And, then, the lobbyists got involved.
The government likes being able to listen in on our phone calls. It helps them help us feel safer, see? But to do so, sometimes they need a little help from your friendly local telephone monopoly, which is kind of a problem for some people. Those people sued the phone companies for helping the government make sure that you’re not a vicious terrorist, like you have the right to privacy or something. And, then, the lobbyists got involved.
The NSA, the domestic intelligence agency that really wishes you still hadn’t heard of it, was frustrated by their growing inability to keep their close-kept secrets out of the newspapers. So between 2002 and 2004 they held some off-the-record “media seminars” where they explained to reporters that they really shouldn’t report anything they know about the NSA and its many probably unconstitutional programs. And then, a couple years later, the New York Sun is reporting the details of those seminars. Meta! 
Do you remember the “grunge music”? It was a short-lived variant of meathead stadium rawk featuring incoherent wails of discontent, terrible music and a sort of homeless-lumberjack-sasquatch costume. Nobody liked it. Anyway, one of the “grunge sensations” was called “Pearl Jam” which, we think, is some sort of piercing-salon slang for ejaculating on the neck of your “old lady” or something. 
In the Watergate era, “Deep Throat” was supposedly a government insider who met Bob Woodward in a parking garage and moodily smoked cigarettes while wearing a trench coat. The fact that Woodward himself was a government spook recently transferred from Naval Intelligence to the Washington Post newsroom led many to assume “Deep Throat” was a group of CIA bigshots nervous about the Nixon Administration turning the nation into a dictatorship, or something. Anyway, Nixon finally gave up for the sake of the country and everybody won Academy Awards for “All the President’s Men” and Henry Kissinger is still at large. 
William Hamilton Martin and Bernon Mitchell worked for the NSA back in the late 1950s, when the NSA was still wiretapping on coconut radios and pterodactyl phonographs. In 1960, they flew to Mexico, then to Cuba, and took a freighter to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately granted citizenship and gave a press conference where they announced that they’d fit in much better in the USSR because the USSR wasn’t full of squares and phonies (it was 1960, remember). Back home, everyone decided that these two had defected because they were totally gay for each other.
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