Debate: PRISM and NSA Spying

By Jake and Glenn

In case you’re too fucking stupid to read the news - or bury yourself in the “funny pages” to avoid the wrongs of the world around you - earlier this summer a whistleblower named Edward Snowden revealed a long-suspected network of NSA/CIA/whatever programs that siphon data from giant communications companies for “analysis.”  Though no one doubts the program is illegal and immoral, people do very much doubt whether a debate about it can be funny.  Read Jake and Glenn’s private communication on this issue, recently leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, to find out!

Glenn: I know the knee-jerk reaction from civil libertarians on the left and true, freedom-loving patriots on the right is anger and outrage.  No one wants to imagine the National Security Agency pouring over the emails you send, the phone calls you make, the sexts you send unsolicited to your female friends.  And don’t worry - they aren’t!  If you followed the story closely via TMZ, you read that it was only “metadata” that was collected in mass quantities.  Why would someone like me, or my debate partner who has only called one phone number over the last two years, be worried about the spy agencies seeing the list of people you’ve called or when you’ve called them?  

Jake: I do not want the government keeping an eye on me!  Let me text my friends about watching “Mad Men” and “2 Broke Girls” without “Big Brother” keeping tabs on my viewing habits.  If I wanted President Obama knowing which programs I’m enjoying, then I would send him a letter filled with my opinions and anthrax in the mail.  I have never done that and I never will do that.  Let me keep my secrets between me and my best friends.  I don’t want the President knowing about my friend’s new boyfriend or Glenn’s refusal to see NXT live in Orlando, because his girlfriend would break up with him.  Let’s keep the government out of our lives like all of those dumb fuck tea party dicks keep saying.

Glenn: Don’t insult the tea party!  They’re exactly where they need to be on this issue: reluctantly pushing the issue because the President is black and a Democrat.  Even a broken, constantly spinning atomic clock that randomly stops when the Halebopp comet approaches Earth can be right once a century.  We need to remember that it isn’t some lonely, fat, underpaid, subcontracted “intelligence” employee reading your lonely, fat, underpaid, subcontracted emails to your mom or mass texts on Easter telling all of your co-workers that “He Has Risen Again.”  They might instead run a search for everyone who sends a mass text ON Easter, to get an idea of which people are Christians and thus shall be sent to the FEMA gas chambers.  Otherwise they have to go door to door and ask people on the Census, and who wants that?

Jake: Spying is never okay.  This is the lesson we learned during the special mescaline-fueled screening of “Zero Dark Thirty.”  If there was no spying then Osama bin Laden would still be alive and visiting the complaint department in the Sunday funny pages.  I miss the days when the bald-headed, big nosed, pantless bin Laden would haplessly find himself in a situation of bad luck and hilarity.  Those days are gone, thanks to President Obama and Gary Trudeau.  The only PRISM I can get behind is the one on the cover of that Pink Floyd album.  That’s where I start and stop on fucking refractory light.

Glenn: I am not certain but it sounds like you’re confusing Osama bin Laden with Ziggy, the infamous agnostic cartoon character for whom things never seem to go right? I agree with you that we need more Ziggy in the Sunday comics section of the Quad City Times (or whichever local paper our readers might enjoy) but I disagree about the idea that the PRISM program or whatever other NSA led data monitoring projects led to bin Laden’s apprehension. He was actually arrested by the Mossad after he threatened to reveal their involvement in 9/11. The programs Edward Snowden exposed are only for monitoring potential domestic activists terrorists like many of our readers. Apparently this upsets hardened civil liberties activists (like tea party types, conservative intellectuals, etc) but for the rest of us it’s an easy escape: as long as we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear besides the fact that every email, text and phone call will be databased and catalogued by a government spying program.

Jake: Edward Snowden is a real life Ziggy, showing the entire world that the government is pulling a massive Watergate. Edward Snowden is deepthroat, and not just because of his world famous no-gag blowjobs. Snowden is a snitch, and perhaps Young Jeezy will be upset with him, but the rest of us are thankful for him blowing the whistle on the government. We will stand with him until he rapes somebody. Until then, Snowden, you are a hero. PRISM is just another way the government is trying to turn this country into 1984, the year, not the George Orwell novel. I just can’t handle those synthesizers again.