The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Spies R Us

This week the Hot News is this: The Government Is Spying On Us!! Turns out they can check with the phone companies, get a few billion of our numbers we called and using algorithms, figure out who’s been calling Bin Laden. Or their mom in Keokuk. Folks are up in arms. My neighbors are afraid to use their cellphones. Down at the Diner, there’s talk of Big Brother and the necessity to maybe get MORE firepower in their arsenals. GTE Johnny, who used to work in telecommunications, said we ain’t seen nothing yet. “The government knows when you were born, when you got divorced and probably when you’ll die,” he pronounced ominously over his newspaper headline that read: White House Defends Spy Activity. His veggie omelette coagulated while he warned us poor victims what was coming, everything from cyber surveillance to space cameras so powerful they could read the Diner menu from the Hubble.

“There’s no more hiding,” he whispered, although we all knew the hidden microphones in the salt shakers were picking him up Loud and Clear, transmitting his seditious comments to a Cray Super Computer a mile deep under the Rocky Mountains where it was being transcribed, collated and filed in the vast data banks the National Security Agency maintains. Even as Johnny finished, we could imagine storm troopers loading up the black helicopters, GPS set on Camano’s South End, instructions given to breach no resistance, possibly take no prisoners.

“The damn government!” a few soon-to-be-gulag residents shouted over their biscuits and gravy. “Intruding in our private lives. What’s next?!”

Oh, I don’t know. Credit card monitoring? Facebook statistics? Google info gathering? Grocery store scan cards to track our grocery preferences? Yahoo monitoring of our internet so they can customize our ads to maximize profits? Rental car companies using GPS to check our speeds and locations? Cellphone interceptions by crooks and hackers? Security cameras in every store, mall, streetcorner, bar and restaurant? Corporations mining our meta-data to tailor their sales pitch. Phone companies that record every tweet, twitter and text?

If the boyz at the Diner want privacy, well, they should throw away their credit cards, ditch their cellphones, soak their computers in the bathtub, don’t drive, don’t go to town, don’t talk out loud. Do like the Barefoot Bandit — only don’t steal the planes. You think government is spying, welcome to corporate and social networking. You gave Facebook everything you got. Whadja think??? The damn government, as always, would be the last to get this stuff. The NSA shoulda maybe joined Facebook a long time ago. Or YOU shouldn’t have….

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