NSA Agent Is Oh So Shy About Being Filmed/Questioned In Public

[Reefa]

With all that's gone on with the NSA leaks, one thing has been made abundantly clear: the idea of operating in the world without having eyes on us or digging through our motives, is dead. The NSA, admitting it or not, has unilaterally decided that we don't deserve privacy and that our daily lives are an open book should they have any contrived reason to take a peek. Even members ofCongress appear to be under such scrutiny.

Yet it appears that at least some of the folks that work in our version of the thinkpol don't take kindly to being examined and filmed in public.

The NSA sent someone bearing the nametag “Neal Z.” to the University of New Mexico’s Engineering and Science Career Fair today, in the hopes of recruiting young computer geniuses to help manage the yottabytes of data it is collecting about you. But instead of eager young applicants, Mr. Z. encountered University of New Mexico alumnus Andy Beale and student Sean Potter, who took the rare opportunity of being in the room with a genuine NSA agent to ask him about his employer’s illegal collection of metadata on all Americans. Mr. Z. did not like that one bit.

Should you be unable to see the video, the exchange is fairly polite, if persistent, from behind the camera. The NSA employee, on the other hand, is both combative and at one point grabs the interviewers phone. Prior to that, the employee repeats the discredited claim that the NSA does not collect intelligence on US citizens, which by now everyone knows is simply false. Then the name calling starts, followed by the attempt to grab the phone. The two interviewers were subsequently ejected from the building under the notion that they were causing a disturbance. The NSA employee was clearly unhappy about being videotaped and probed.

And it's easy to sympathize with him as a US citizen, since the organization he works for has done the same thing to American citizens. We're brothers of a kind, both having to endure an undue yet meticulous examination of our activities as we simply attempt to go about our lives, working and living less free than we were meant to be. That the irony appeared to be lost on our NSA friend isn't terribly surprising to me. The Ministries of Oceania are not known for their sense of humor, after all.

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