Making an NSA Spy's Job That Much Easier

Former National Security Agency Analyst Russell Tice recently reported to MSNBC that, under intelligence directives issued during the Bush Administration, the NSA has been spying extensively on American citizens, and has specifically targeted American journalists:

Some journalists who have written critically about domestic spying programs have come forward to say they believe they have been placed under government surveillance in retaliation. New York Times reporter James Rise suspects he has been deliberately targeted, because Bush Administration officials recently revealed copies of James' Rise's phone records to a grand jury investigating government leaks.

And even government officials who have expressed doubt about the usefulness or constitutionality of government domestic spying programs, including Deputy Attorney General Comey and former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, have also reported they were subsequently targeted with surveillance.

I've written about government spying programs that target American citizens. I'm not a journalist; I'm a blogger, but the difference is blurring these days. And heaven knows, certain Republican friends of mine have made it pretty clear to me that they consider MOMocrats to be a radical leftist organization. Have I been under government surveillance? If the Obama Administration has not yet shut these domestic spying programs down, could I still be?

At first, of course, the notion of some shadowy government organization possibly monitoring everything from phone conversations with my family to my bookstore purchases really bothered me.

But when I paused to contemplate the mental picture of some poor, low-rank NSA spy sifting through reams upon reams of surveillance data on the contacts and daily habits of suburban Midwestern housewife, I began to take pity on his or her tortured soul. I can just imagine it now: 

INT., OFFICE-EVENING. A dreary cubicle is piled with papers and binders marked Target 5493-A. A computer with numbers scrolling endlessly across its screen casts a sickly glow. DISAFFECTED NSA SPY leans on a very futuristic-looking cordless phone, talking softly. 

DISAFFECTED NSA SPY

Bob, Target 5493-A in St. Louis just called her husband on his cell phone. She asked him to remember to pick up the multigrain bagels her son likes at the grocery store. Do you think that could be some sort of code?

No?

Are you sure? Oh, damn it, Bob. This woman never does anything even remotely interesting. You know I'm better than this. I've got dual PhDs in math and linguistics, for Pete's sake. Why won't the suits upstairs ever let me follow a real menace to society? I could have helped them with that incident in Hollywood, you know.

Yes Bob, I know they're listening to me. Aren't they always listening to everything?

Bob?

Bob?

The phone clicks.

So I've decided that, if the NSA is going to make some poor sap spy on me, I might as well help that poor sap get the job over with before he or she totally snaps. Here you go:

I'm left-handed, and my favorite color is blue. Did both of these things subconsciously predispose me to liberalism? I've never really thought about that before. I do like to joke that my left-handedness makes me sinister. I took Latin in sixth grade, see. But maybe you know that.

I deliberately associate with homosexuals, actors and librarians. I am linked to several professors of literature. Back when I was in high school, I joined an Amnesty International club run by some of my friends, and wrote letters to foreign leaders asking them to release tortured political prisoners.

In college, I studied Spanish, Argentinian, Classical Greek and Classical Sanskrit literature; I worked as a stagehand in a theater that hosted performance groups from around the world, and I took courses on philosophy and comparative religion. I was therefore exposed to many foreign ideas. 

I follow Rachel Maddow on Twitter.

I'm a cat person.

I have Muslim friends. I have Jewish friends. I have Hindu, Catholic, Baptist, Unitarian, Wiccan, atheist and Pastafarian friends. I don't go to church, myself. I haven't ever found one that suits me. When people insist I identify my religion, I tell them I'm a bit of a Pantheist. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge.

I'm a vegetarian. I do it for the environment, mostly. My open meat-eschewing, veggie-eating tendencies have never really seemed like a big deal to me, but apparently, some in our government think veganism is a seriously radical lifestyle choice, since the FBI attempted to infiltrate vegan potlucks in advance of the Republican National Convention last August as part of a sweeping effort to quash political protests in Minneapolis before they even began. If vegans are considered potential terrorists, can vegetarians be far behind? Even though I myself gladly eat eggs and dairy (NSA, if you haven't already found and bookmarked the positively sinful cheesecake photos on my personal blog, you really should), I have been known to consume vegan cupcakes on purpose. And we all know what eating delicious vegan cupcakes leads to.

That's right— eating more delicious vegan cupcakes. At some point— you never know— I might even be tempted to bake some.

If you peruse my library card records (after all, the FBI requests library records on American citizens all the time) you'll note that in the past year, I've checked out, among other things, books on beneficial companion planting in organic herb gardens, a Halloween holiday craft sampler, an educational treatise on plant pollination, the entire Curious George series, as many of those kids' dinosaur books by Jane Yolen as my son could get his eager hands on, and, all right— I'll admit it— a few steamy historical romances.

(I positively loathe dime-store bodice-rippers, but I'm a sucker for anything set convincingly in Moorish Spain or nineteenth-century Vienna. If you ever want to send an attractive male spy to, ahem, infiltrate my confidence, you might want to try having him wear a waistcoat and wire-rim spectacles, and carry a smart walking-stick even though he doesn't need it. I'm just saying.)

While we're on the subject of infiltrating confidences, wink, wink, I had sex with my husband before we were married. I lived with him before we were married, too. Do you not care about that who-has-fornicated-with-whom stuff, anymore? Has it become too mainstream to hold your interest?

I think not. After all, in October, former NSA employees divulged that NSA spies listened in on phone sex between U.S. military officers and their significant others. And those NSA employees do say that other NSA employees passed the recordings of these conversations around the NSA offices for others to listen to. And laughed about it. Laughed about listening in to private conversations between couples separated by war. So I imagine the NSA must have an interest in Americans' sex lives. Though I'm puzzled as to what those phone sex calls could possibly have had to do with national security. 

I'm afraid that you won't get much in the way of racy listening material from me. I don't actually talk on the phone that often, but when I do, it's usually with my sister. We talk a lot about gardening. And do-it-yourself home repair projects. And amateur genealogy. Sometimes we argue. It's usually about something stupid, as arguments between siblings generally are.

In fact, aside from what I've already mentioned above, I expect you, my poor spy, will be sadly disappointed by the lack of controversial or titillating items in my dossier. I've never shoplifted. I've never smoked pot. I've never had a drinking problem. I've never cheated on my husband. I've never committed any lewd acts in public. (Though I did once or twice breastfeed my infant child on a park bench without a blanket covering his face. I do not regret this practice in the slightest, though, so it cannot be used as blackmail.)

All in all, even as the lives of middle class suburban mothers generally go, my daily life is exceptionally boring. 

The most interesting thing about me, as far as you're concerned, is not something I'm not sure you'll be able to divine from my phone conversations or library records.

The only thing a government spy really needs to know about me is that I am a patriot.

I love my country, see, and deeply respect the ideals that my public elementary school teachers taught me my country stands for, the ones spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Of course as an adult, I've come to realize that in reality my country has never yet lived up to the ideals it was founded upon. But that hasn't estranged my affection for those ideals.

On the contrary, the realization that my nation does not live up to is own cherished values has made me all the more determined to promote and protect them.

I may be a boring, ordinary American citizen. I may be just another work-at-home mother, typing from my living room in a track pants and a rumpled t-shirt while a four-year-old bangs on a toy piano in the background.

But I'm hell-bent on protecting the principles embodied in my own Constitution by freely exercising one of the most important rights it grants me— freedom of speech— to protect the other rights it grants me— including freedom from unreasonable searches.

You don't need to spy on me to discover that. I'll happily shout it into the public square.

Jaelithe sincerely hopes that President Obama meant it when he said, "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," and, as an American citizen, hereby calls upon him to shut down any and all U.S. government domestic spying programs that violate the U.S. Constitution.

Comments

[OmegaMom]

Hah! You have made me feel very sorry for that NSA spy with the Ph.D.s!

[Miranda Marquit]

Wow. I sort of knew it was happening, but you hate to see the actual evidence. Now I wonder: Could I be hauled away for some of the stuff I've said -- and looked at on the Internet?

[sapphire]

what tha- hey all i want is for the gaverment to start a spy program for kids it can atleast be top secret and include ages 13and up gosh i wanna work secretly for the goverment and still be a teen to goshh.......
well if you read this take it under consideration an hopfuly accept me and other teens who want the same.