Oh sure. Act all surprised and offended and/or smug. You were all forewarned. Just a few short weeks ago I gave you a complete heads up on the whole “oooh, data gathering so big you have no privacy at all” thing that’s going on with your tacit if not explicit approval. Then the NSA leak happened and left the whole world like WTF? Over as that bastion of individual liberty and freedom and justice for all got caught with one hand in the Democracy-chip cookie jar and the other fiddling about under the covers.

Once again, I was ahead of the curve.

Way.

But, as comfortable as they are, I cannot rest on my laurels. For one there’s the whole allergic thing but, more importantly, as this story develops it appears that we are getting so completely bullshitted in a vain attempt to cover up how bad it really is.

First the facts. One Ed Snowdon – aged 29, a guy who has to check the first box for the “Level of Education” question on the Match.com application – in the course of his duties as an Intelligence Consultant working for Booz-Allen-Hamilton downloads a shitload of stuff from the Super-Secret, Hyper-Secure, computer systems of the National Security Agency, an agency whose very existence was hush-hush up until 1975. These documents, which concerned the Nasty Things that the NSA was up to under the program code named Prism, revealed that the top domestic spooks were basically looking over everybody’s shoulder while they were online or listening in when they were talking on the phone.

Everybody’s.

Needless to say – even though you weren’t surprised because of the laurel-draped, informative-yet-humorous revelations you first read here – the rest of the world was aghast. Forget the constitution, forget that the world looks to us as the shining beacon of freedom blah, blah, blah, blah, forget even that one of the government’s jobs is to spy on other countries. The rest of the world was all pissed off because the NSA was spying on their citizens.

Because that’s the CIA’s job.

The CIA was chartered to take over the work of the OSS following World War Two. This brought it out from under the control of the Pentagon and left it under the control of Nobody which suited the spies just fine. The problem was that the CIA is specifically prohibited from spying on U.S. citizens so as not to infringe on their constitutionally guaranteed rights blah, blah, blah, blah. To get around that little challenge the NSA was formed in 1952 to spy on directly on the United States, they kept this secret for twenty three years.

With a blank check and an open mandate the boys at the NSA went to town.

The end result is that they now have records of every phone call made and allinternet activity.

Remember that the next time you type “redtube.com”.

In any event, these allegations were so unbelievable that they were initially met with skepticism, followed by incredulity, followed by “they did that?” Because, unbelievable as they were, they’re all true.

The logical stumbling block people trip over is that this is way too much information to deal with in any meaningful way – an argument I debunked in my earlier post – and thus this “revelation” is really just something to get our knickers in a twist. But that’s because we think and experience in what has come to be known as “real time” and not in the trans-warp driven speed in which data lives. But given that one state of the art data server could keep tabs on all seven or so billion internet queries, transactions, tweets and Facebook status updates that happen every day in only about five hours, there remain nineteen hours to do other stuff with the data. Plus, I’m guessing that the NSA owns a couple of computers so they’ll have to do something with the other one too. 

Like read your email.

Now, I’m not a fan of complicated conspiracies mostly because the class of people that the government hires for their intelligence operations is the opposite of that. While all the other countries in the world are going all gee-whiz on us for looking at their citizens’ online behavior they don’t fathom that the real reason we’re sweeping them is because it was easier to have everybody on the watch list than to slow things down by applying filters and restricting the snooping to legitimate targets, like you. It’s kind of like having a drawer full of Twist-Ties; you’ll probably never need one but it’s nice to know you have a few saved up. Information is like that, the marginal cost of acquiring and storing everybody’s activity is small compared to grabbing only those people who bother us. So we just went ahead and bugged everybody. Plus, then we have the data in the drawer with the Twist-Ties; just in case we ever need it.

Not that information and knowledge are manifestations of the same thing, as evidenced by the Boston-bomber foul-up by the FBI. But I digress.

But I am a fan of simple conspiracies mainly in the form of: ABSURD PROPOSITION + GOVERNMENT = THE TRUTH. In this case I wasn’t surprised at all that the Feds were up to no good vis-á-vis monitoring my every activity, but what did surprise me was the guy they selected to take the information public. (Spoiler Alert: the next president has to be a Republican so Mr. Hope and Change needs to look more like Satan’s emissary than a community organizer from the South Side. First the drone strikes, now this. Perfect.)

So they send Ed Snowdon off to Hawaii to hang on the beaches and click the “Download Now” button and pay him 122 (also reported as 200) grand a year to do so. Have you listened to Ed Snowdon? He of the supposed GED education? Go listen to the interview, he’s got as much of a GED as most of you do. He’s well-presented, articulate, clear thinking, and there were no grease stains on his shirt from flipping burgers. But most of all, he’s not nervous. No uhs and duhs. No long pauses. No sweat. He’s a pro.

Because he’s a spy.

When the United States had a problem with UFOs back in the 1950s and 1960s, they sent in the Air Force. Not to hunt down flying saucers, not to track them on radar, not to attempt communication with the aliens at Area 51. They sent in the Air Force as investigators. This was because the “aliens” at Area 51 were the CIA and the UFOs were sightings of the phenomenally fast and phenomenally secret A-12 Oxcart spy plane. So the Air Force took down all the particulars of the E.T. sightings, empanelled “independent” commissions to study the UFOs, and dutifully reported their findings back to the concerned citizenry.

Which were nothing.

And we’ve got the same thing now; except the brightly colored balloon everybody’s focusing on isn’t UFOs, it’s about the government taking your data and cross-referencing your kid playing a desert sheikh in the school play with a band of terrorists hiding out in Brooklyn. We’ve got the distraction. We’ve got the hero-slash-traitor on the run with the entire enforcement apparatus of the United States government on his heels. Plus we have the Head of All Things Secret testifying to congress that everything’s okay and little Bobby “Mohammar” Jones from Ames, Iowa really has nothing to worry about.

So everybody’s up in arms. Talking and testifying and pointing fingers. While the NSA keeps adding more and more disk space to hold the data they’re haven’t stopped collecting.

And then Ed Snowdon shows up in Hong Kong??? A place with an extradition treaty with the U.S.??? Is this guy some kind of a dope???

But Hong Kong it was, and last Sunday he records the interview with The Guardian. Then Monday at noon…

He just disappears.

He leaves behind his freedom. He leaves behind his cool job. He leaves behind a nice house. And he leaves behind his trés chic girlfriend-slash-fiancée who describes herself as “a world-traveling, pole-dancing superhero.”

Exactly what about that makes you think he isn’t a spy? 

My guess is that he’s working his way into the welcoming arms of his new Chinese hosts. The “leak” thing was just a cred-building excercise. I’m pretty sure we won’t be hearing much from Ed Snowdon for a while. It’ll take a few years to build up his cover by showing his new friends the ropes. He’ll need to share a few drinks with his employers; earn their trust and confidence. And then, one dark night, he’ll push a button and download all the information in China.

Straight into the NSA’s computers.

For this, his choice of Hong Kong was perfect. He’s credibly distant. He’s close to the Red Menace on the mainland. He’s all set for his infiltration. Plus, it’s the place James Bond goes when he needs to disappear.