Saying what he never said.

Dear George,

When one of McCain’s aides didn’t say what he denied saying he never said, that another terrorist attack would pump some life into McCain’s campaign, he uttered a truth that was never spoken.

There are two ways we can encourage a terrorist attack: piss off as many people as possible, or be so crushed beneath a sea of data that Osama could send a plain text message with detailed instructions for the next attack and we’d never notice.

After 9/11, the intelligence community was criticized for failing to connect the dots prior to the attack. What critics failed to mention was that it is difficult to connect dots when the paper you’re looking at contains ten-thousand dots.

George, I’m happy to report the situation is even worse than it was in 2001. Thanks to your recently legalized illegal snooping, the goddamn paper has so many dots on it that it’s a solid black. We can no longer find any dots to connect.

One writer summed the situation up when he wrote, “In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting. As a result, more than 90 percent of the information is was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.”

But, it gets better. According to the above cited writer, inthe wake of 9/11, John “Love those Contras” Poindexter came up with a cockamamie scheme to use information technology to prepare dossiers on all 300 million Americans. Congress put the kibosh on it as being slightly unconstitutional. So the NSA did what it usually does when Congress says “no,” it farmed the project out to private contractors.

Our intelligence circuits are now so clogged with information that Osama could drive a sixteen-wheeler, emblazoned with the al-Qaeda logo, cross country and reports of his progress would be buried in the tsunami of data that floods the Beltway every day.

It’s the same old story. Every new technology inscribes a parabolic curve with an ascent, an apogee and a descent. Information Technology (IT) is no different. We’ve become so sophisticated at data gathering that we’ve reached a tipping point in which it is clogging our arteries

The bottom line is that the more data our intelligence agencies gather, the greater the probability that the terrorist attack the McCain camp denied it ever wished for, will happen.

Self mutilation is a beauty to behold.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones