Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner

Last night my landlord/friend AP and I were joined by his loving daughter on the roof of the Fort Greene Observatory. AP hugged Lizzie and pointed out stars. It was a clear sky for New York. "Up there is Alpha Centuari. It's the closest star to Earth." "How far away?" Lizzie was a curious child. "4 light-years." "So if we drove there it would take a long time." "Yes." AP and I will never make that trip. Planes flittered across the low horizon. "And there satellites up there." I hadn't ever seen one above New York. "Spying on us." AP believed there was something terribly wrong about the NSA eavesdropping program. "But we're not doing anything wrong," protested Lizzie. The ten year-old had long blonde hair and I called her Hippie Girl with affection. "Yes, we are doing nothing wrong, but it's time to go to sleep." The three of us descended off the roof. I went to my room and listened to PUBLIC IMAGE by Public Image, then opened up my MacBook to read the news. The BBC reported that thousands of Germans and New Zealanders were protesting against the NSA spy program. The only public gatherings in America were at baseball parks this weekend. No one munching on an over-priced hot dog at Yankee Stadium cared about the evasive surveillance programme known as Prism or Eric Snowdon. The German government has denied any knowledge of the secret electronic spy network. In the words of the immortal Colonel Klink from HOGAN'S HEROES, "I know nothing." And the same can be said about the Land of the Free, except we say, "I don't care about nothing." I only wish I could feel the same.

All Ears

According to Wikipedia the National Security Agency is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence. The NSA employs 40,000 people at various locations and its annual budget is a secret, although intelligence analysts have estimated the per annum outlay at $10 billion plus. The NSA has excelled at maintaining at low profile since its creation in 1949, although the agency's mission was expanded after 9/11 to include illegal wire taps under GW Bush and data-mining through its PRISM project. Criticism against War on Terrorism has been considered treason by most Americans and the government has vigorously punished or minimize whistle-blowers and reporters endangering the NSA's veil of secrecy. Early this month The Guardian published accusations from Edward Snowden, a Central Intelligence Agency employee who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, that the NSA had ordered various telecommunication companies in the USA to provide data for all telephone calls within the United States, including local telephone calls” and all calls made “between the United States and abroad.” I make approximately twenty calls a day. There are over 300 million phones in America, meaning that the NSA processes six billion calls per day along with 1.7 billion e-mails. In 2012 NSA employees dealt with over trillion calls, which I have calculated to be a 2.5 billion calls each year. Massive supercomputers assist the harried intelligence operatives, but I suspect that millions of calls are dumped into delete files much like the post office employee dumped junk mail in the trash. Even worse was the report from the BBC that the billions of dollars spent on PRISM ended up revealing information on fewer than 300 phone number in 2012, meaning that the PRISM program is another cash cow for the military-industrial complex and its effectiveness is as meaningful as catapulting every elephant in the world to kill a single mouse. The NSA refutes the worthlessness of data-mining by arguing that "dozens of potential terrorist plots here in the homeland and in more than 20 countries around the world". The NSA provided no details, donning their cloak on secrecy, proving the best secrets are those that aren't really secrets. Mumble, my fellow Americans and strutters have a party. The NSA knows nothing. And Eric Snowden knew that. He has now vanished from Hong Kong. And there are plenty of