Sunday, June 30, 2013

How Is This Useful?

The Washington Post shows the PRISM slides that Edward Snowden released.  This one got me:


What possible use could all that data be?  There's got to be so much useless information there that they miss so many more important things.  As Andy Borowitz mocks:
Despite having an annual budget in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars, the agency had no idea that a dude who was working for it five days a week was getting ready to send those classified documents to a journalist who would then tell everybody in the world.
“Maybe if we hadn’t been so busy keeping our eye on those other three hundred million people, we would have noticed that this one guy who was working right under our noses was up to something totally fishy,” the spokesman said. “But you know what they say about hindsight.”
Seriously, how can Facebook posts and chats provide almost any useful information, unless the NSA is really interested in what people I went to high school with ate, or where they were drinking beer, or what funny thing their kids said or did?  I haven't seen anybody post a status update saying "Planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge."  Anyway, it would probably be more accurate to say, "An FBI plant came to me with an idea to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge." 

I can't believe any Democrats would support this plan because it makes the government look like boorish, incompetent fools wasting taxpayer dollars, and I can't believe any Republicans would support it because it actually lives up to their usually irrational sounding fears about Big Government.  But both parties seem to have an irrational fear of (Islamic) terrorism.

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