To: National Security Agency
Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
Date: Classified
Dear NSA:
Hi, it's me again. I've just read that you are harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging “buddy lists”. I wanted to ask you for another favor. You see, I don't have many online friends. I don't visit chat rooms, and most of my e-mail comes from spammers, not real people. The life of a writer is a solitary, lonely existence. Then, I learned that, in just one day, the NSA collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, and 33,697 from Gmail. Entire address books filled with contact information for all sorts of people. Not to mention the contacts from 500,000 buddy lists the NSA collects daily! It occurred to me, since you have all these contacts, you could share a few with me. Just to help me build my friend base.
I mean, the information is just sitting in your NSA database, anyway. It's not like you're going to do anything else with it ... Come to think of it, what are you planning to do with all of our e-mail addresses and chat names? I understand the address books you download often include, not only names and e-mail addresses, but also phone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information, so can you send me only the people who live near me?
This could benefit millions of the Americans you're already spying on. You could introduce strangers by sharing their e-mails and we could all end up making lots of new friends online. It would be like a creepy version of Match.com. In fact, I'm so confident you'll be successful, I've even registered the domain for you, CreepyMatch.com. Of course, we'll need a disclaimer for the site, because some people will think NSA stands for No Strings Attached. Wink, wink. We know better, don't we?
Your pal,
Keith @ (oh, never mind, you have my address already)
Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
Date: Classified
Dear NSA:
Hi, it's me again. I've just read that you are harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging “buddy lists”. I wanted to ask you for another favor. You see, I don't have many online friends. I don't visit chat rooms, and most of my e-mail comes from spammers, not real people. The life of a writer is a solitary, lonely existence. Then, I learned that, in just one day, the NSA collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, and 33,697 from Gmail. Entire address books filled with contact information for all sorts of people. Not to mention the contacts from 500,000 buddy lists the NSA collects daily! It occurred to me, since you have all these contacts, you could share a few with me. Just to help me build my friend base.
I mean, the information is just sitting in your NSA database, anyway. It's not like you're going to do anything else with it ... Come to think of it, what are you planning to do with all of our e-mail addresses and chat names? I understand the address books you download often include, not only names and e-mail addresses, but also phone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information, so can you send me only the people who live near me?
This could benefit millions of the Americans you're already spying on. You could introduce strangers by sharing their e-mails and we could all end up making lots of new friends online. It would be like a creepy version of Match.com. In fact, I'm so confident you'll be successful, I've even registered the domain for you, CreepyMatch.com. Of course, we'll need a disclaimer for the site, because some people will think NSA stands for No Strings Attached. Wink, wink. We know better, don't we?
Your pal,
Keith @ (oh, never mind, you have my address already)
Hi Keith! Spent the last several months working on our new house, still digging spackle out from under my fingernails ... but had to bop in to say how much I've missed your witty & wonderful musings <3 :)
ReplyDeleteAnd - per usual - you're spot on! ((hugs)) Mary Ann
Good to see you're still alive and kicking, Mary Ann. The blog has been like a barren tree without your insightful and entertaining comments. Looking forward to seeing more of you! Welcome back. :)
ReplyDelete