How To Know the Goverment is Watching You
(I’m working on it. Please feel free to add.)
10. Your TIVO is recording you.
9. During dinner at a nice restaurant, your potato distinctly says, “Speak up, please.”
8. You have more vans parked in front of your house than a 1960s Janis Joplin concert.
7. When pest control comes to your house, they find real bugs.
6. Your cat keeps pooping tiny microphones.
5. The Onstar lady starts inquiring as to WHY you want to go to 764 Elm Street, who lives there and when you plan on coming home.
4. The black car following you has the license plate IRS LUV
3. The Secretary of State calls your name on national tv for your “relations” with Thai’s Message Parlor.
2. The President uses your toast at Bob’s wedding in the State of the Union address.
1. Your dropped cell phone calls make an actual crashing sound.
I have decided that my Verizon cellphone’s frequent need to announce itself for no apparent need, is just NSA’s way of saying, “I love you!”
I guess we know we are in trouble when we hear the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” and our computer pipes up, “You know that’s right!”
1Ping!
2You know you are in trouble when the NSA’s new theme song is, “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and the lyrics are amended to include: and to check all your emails and phone records….
3I don’t recall anyone being worried in the past when your phone bill would contain all the long distance numbers you called, with their numbers and how long you talked!
4How about this:
“NSA Domestic Surveillance began 7 months before 9 – 11” Quest CEO claims! As found in James Risen’s book “State of War, ” pg 42
7 Months before 9-11 would be in March of ’01, while W was on one of his many vacations, at his dude ranch in Texas
11. They call to tell you your guitar is out of tune.
(Mine goes to 11.)
5“Can you hear me now” takes on a whole new meaning; maybe We the People should be asking that question instead of Verizon.
6And not to our home and call phones, but at Town meetings, emails to our Congress Critters and at the voting establishments.
Good point Bosco Brown, and verrrrrrry interesting.
7There isa great cartoon about this that you might appreciate:
8http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3005#comic
And if you currently can’t sleep through the night wondering about all of this, what if you made regular conference calls with business associates? Your bill would list every single number on the call and how long they spoke. This is like the bill I get from my mechanic: itemized for every thing he touched under the hood and how long it took him to work on it. Now if I were a conspiracy filbert, I would think that there was something hinky going on here. i recently got a new security system for my home that involves On Star and is totally wireless. This was my spirited reaction to the way Verizon’s 911 service totally disappeared in a storm at the end of last June when all phone service was knocked out thereby dissolving my old home security service which depended on the land line. If we ever have another storm like that again, I have a better chance of getting 911 with the wireless stuff. Whoever is listening wherever, gawd, do I hope you like being bored!
9I’m more concerned about the 5 million secret clearances,1.4 million of them have a top-secret one and 1/3 of those are private contractors.
1011. Your new e-mail messges are never marked “unread.”
1112. You start getting “friend” requests from folks like “G. Mann, Jr.” or “Friends of Jedgar”
13. Your real friends start talking like “Remember the guy at that place with the thing…?”
14. No matter what ringtone you choose, it all sounds like Rockwell’s 1984 hit “Somebody’s Watching Me.”
15. Verizon customer support insists the camera light always stays on.
16. Big Brother Season 15 promos all feature your den.
17. You hear disembodied guffaws as you step out of the shower.
18. Your Limited Edition Numbered Director’s Cut of The Truman Show goes missing.
19. On a class trip to Washington, DC, your kids play I Spy With My Little Eye…with Eric Holder.
20. [This joke deleted under the Authority of NSA Directive 06-142/(x)]
Oh heck. When you do some “window shopping” on-line, and the item you “window shopped” just keeps showing up every place you visit.
I don’t have Verizon. I was “bugged” years ago by AT&T.
And, I must say, I don’t recall all the “moral outrage” about that. Or about the fact that the Bush Administration wanted to know what library books I was reading.
I guess, like everything else. The “Outrage” level…. depends upon who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
12Miemaw, there has been a teeny thing bugging my brain ever since i found out about this guy who spilled the beans. He was supposedly handling what all the politicians have been claiming to be “state secrets” but he was actually at the bottom of the totem pole of techies in his outfit. This does not compute. If the stuff he was assigned to was actually that “hot”, why wasn’t someone with a hugely much higher pay grade and security classification given this job? What gives?
13Miemaw: You speak the truth. Where was the Republican outrage over all the intrusions of the Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance under Dubya?
14I was on the phone with Aunt Ruth, getting her potato salad recipe. Then suddenly, I heard this voice and it wasn’t Aunt Ruth’s!
He asked if we could speak up just a little louder and if we’d go back two ingredients, he’d really appreciate it.
15You are breathing.
16daChipster, your #17 reminds me of my Dad.
He used to say, “you know how we can tell there aren’t invisible aliens watching us? Because if there were, we would hear them laughing.”
Honestly, I’m playing Ostrich on this one because I believe that the government has accepted a right to essentially spy on any citizen since McCarthy AND that in general if they really want to focus on my stuff, the analyst is going to end up really bored. And yes, I do realize that being in Ostrich position leaves my rear all ready for a good booting.
17As for the question about why is low-on-totem-pole-person getting this highly sensitive information…because it involves government workers. In general, although there are always gems in any group, there are plenty of incompetent pass-the-buck make-no-decision workers in government fields too.
Of course, that also is a Dad’ism–he worked on Nuclear Program and has all sorts of opinions on how secret some secrets were.
18I have a cat that chews wiring. Does that count?
19I am so glad I dropped in here. The hooting and shrieking out on the rest of the intertoobz is deafening.
Miemaw, Maggie and maryelle pretty much nailed it. Especially Miemaw’s observation:
“I guess, like everything else. The “Outrage” level…. depends upon who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
I am of the opinion that the surveillance horse left the barn a long, long time ago…
20Oh yeah… I forgot. I also think there is a very good chance that young Snowden is indeed more than a little nuts…
21I was going to say, “If you use a phone and/or computer,” but I think Don A in Pennsyltucky has all the bases covered already.
22Star, young Snowden is not a guvmint worker. He was with Booz Allen Hamilton, the largest contractor for the government. I am getting the feeling that he was not properly supervised as to what he was doing and how. Also, I have heard that such “contractors” are never left to do this kind of work eternally but rotated around so they don’t get a chance to go, frankly, a little nutcakes. I really think the nothingness of his job got to him.
23On a side note, if you’ve got a wireless router – try changing the ID from the boring default name to something like “NSA Post 666”. See how long it takes before someone asks you to correct it to the right number…
24Maryelle — I doubt we’ll ever know the extent of illegal shenanigans perpetrated by King Cheney and Figurehead Bush. Any outrage at that time? Not that I’ve heard.
25If the NSA wants to listen to anything on our home land line they will find out a lot about thrift stores wanting donations, people telling us we have a new security system that is ours for free, or better yet new siding. As to any of our cell phones our daughters would be the best. She and her friends can talk for hours in some sort of code that requires sighs, grunts / groans, and a lot of whatevers and reallys plus whispers.
By the way if anyone remembers George Tenet (CIA Director during the Carter and Bush 1’s admins)? A few years ago he wrote a good book about his years of being Top Spook. He even mentioned the NSA’s capabilities back then. But the problems remain the same. Not enough people to listen, not enough computer crunching capability, and not enough people to understand a lot of foreign languages (not to mention understanding a lot of what passes for English these days).
Outrage? Maybe. But why now? Has most of the US been asleep for the last 20 / 30 years? This is not new. It may not be right, and I’m not offering excuses, but com’on man!
Oh yeah, does anyone who uses the internet ever think about “cookies” Those little jewels keep track, and report on, lots of things that we do online.
26To add to Captain Dave, the Supreme Court cleared this activity years ago. Do not know what legal leg the various lawsuits can stand on.
27In the 1960s the technology was in place to “listen” to all phone calls, select keywords and record those conversations where any keywords were utilized. There were satellites in place that could get a good enough picture to read license plates or see upper appendages and determine if a “target” was male or female … and that was in the early sixties.
When the current program was initiated in 2001 it was restricted to conversations involving people in “Muslim” nations. Tracking individual movements was tedious enough that it was limited to high-priority targets. Care was taken through the FISA courts to insure that it did not unduly inhibit or interfere with the liberties of individuals or groups of Americans.
When Bush expanded this program, a great many of us Conservatives were screaming at the top of our lungs about the violations taking place … yet oddly enough we were ignored by the Mainstream Media as we did not fit the bill and it did not sell as well as the more sensationalist news of the day did. Just because you never saw it or never heard it does not mean it did not ever happen. Research some of the larger conservative groups’ archives and there is still plenty of evidence of our contesting such constitutionally questionable actions even if you never did become informed by your favorite cable news network or political pundits.
Fast forward to today and there are some substantial differences that make this particularly disturbing. Obama made many mentions about how illegal such actions were as a senator and as a candidate. It was one of the very few venues he actually participated in during his limited time as a senator before campaigning for president began. Like many of his campaign issues, his “moral compass” regarding the illegal actions began to spin sharply once he was elected. He had an opportunity to end the Patriot Act but rather than end it, he expanded the powers of the executive branch and the ability of the government to circumvent the constitution, our liberties and our freedoms. He passed the NDAA only after more special powers were granted along with the inclusion of American citizens who were not even under suspicion of having ever committed a crime, much less committing any crimes against the “state” … meaning the federal bureaucracy and not the state as in we the people. Numerous attacks on political opponents have been implemented based on partisan political actions taken by bureaucracies that are lawfully required to maintain an impartial stance.
A great many of the people defending this action now will almost certainly be decrying it as oppressive and illegal “when the other guy is in power” as has been done so often in the past. Again, any opposition by “the other guys” will be ignored by the press so that partisan politics can still be utilized as an effective means of dividing the populace. Hide your head in the sand if you will but you may as well grab your tube of KY and duct tape it to what is left above ground. Whether it is “this guy” or “the other guy” in power, when either one of them have this much power, someone is going to get screwed hard.
28Who voted for FISA, the bill that made PRISM possible?
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/who-voted-for-fisa/
29Your answering machine is constantly full, yet all the messages are gone.
30You try to turn off your computer and you get a pop-up saying, “Others are logged on to this computer. Do you really want to shut down?”
31Amazon sends me some e-mail, daily, offering other books of the same genre as previous purchases. They also keep offering three gallon beverage dispensers because I once accidently clicked on a picture of one. The NSA would be smart to subcontract to Amazon which knows every move I make.
32Re TIV -Customers of Comcast and some other cable companies may have equipment installed that can record audio and some even have video capability. They say it’s not turned on, but my question is why is it even installed in the first place? If I want to monitor my home from outside, I’ll install my own webcams feeding a secure server.
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