The New York Times reports (I kid you not) that people are becoming afraid to use search engines, now that they know Bush administration spooks have been looking over their shoulders:
Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a “rent boy.”
It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy – a young male prostitute?
Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. “I told him I’d Googled ‘rent boy,’ just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night,” she said.
Don’t follow the example of our dear Ms. Hanson! Fear not, I say! Fear not! As the great Frank, Lynn, and Eleanor Roosevelt once put it, “We’ve got nothing to get freaked out about, except getting freaked out about something, so chill.” You freak out, they win. You chill, they lose. Or, as Jonas and Ezekiel said to Jephsakiah lo these many years ago upon entering Jericho, “Messeth thee with the heads of thine opponents, and thou shalt bear the honey-dappled fruit of that tree over there, no, not that one, the other one, a million times over.” Freaketh not thine self out, but thy snoopy Big Brother instead. eth.
What I mean is that rather than turning this latest revelation into a depression-laden self-pity party, why not have fun instead by turning the spy program against the spies? I’ve known lots of spies in my time (at least I think they have, I don’t know for sure, they didn’t say, but they had the look, you know, that one, no, not that one, the other one), and let me tell you: nothing bugs a spy more than someone coming up and talking to them. It completely blows their whole “I am the dark, the shadow, the night” invisibility schtick.
The trick is to annoy the spook squad into submission. They want pornography searches? Fine, let’s give ‘em pornography searches! Head over to yahoo.com and search for “even latina lovelies in stockings know that government intrusion is bogus.” Or maybe “I have no idea what the hell a MILF is, but I sure as hell know about the NSA” would be better. Visit msn.com and type in “My hot naked teacher told me that spying on innocent, young, and even horny Americans is barely legal.” And let’s not forget to drop by AOL.com, where we can enter “amateur gay boys know intelligence agents have limp dicks.”
The possibilities are endless. Let the fun begin!
I just did all four of those searches. Forcing a direct match with quotation marks yields no hits, natch. They’ll probably all link back here eventually.
Bob,
Hi!
No hits for you, but you’ve been hit. When the feds sift your search terms under “dirty porn,” they’ll A) have to deal with your chaff, B) chafe at your snarky criticism.
But mostly I was just having fun with this post. Sometimes fun is ok. No, no it’s not! Yes, yes it is.