The Call of the Open Sidewalk

Oh, what a week it's been!

So we've learned that an intelligence agency called the NSA that is run by one of the more popular countries has pretty much converted the Internet into a huge Super-Orwellian surveillance system. Breathtaking in scope but we more or less knew that already. Then last week we learned that we had to promote NSA to supervillian level status.

It turns out that the NSA has been actively working to degrade and destroy the use of encryption on the Internet. It appears in retrospect that they have been very effective at this. The best guess as to why they are doing this terrible thing is to make it easier for them to do surveillance. So not only is the NSA engaging in evil against the whole world, they are doing so for a reason that would only make sense in a Saturday morning cartoon. Presumably they were also planning to eventually use this advantage to steal all the money in the world, or at least to show everyone what the G.I. Joe's look like in their underwear...

The story so far:

A low level IT tech discovers that he has more or less been contracted out to Cobra Command. But this is no ordinary IT tech! Using his superior skill and wit he tricks the evil organization into giving him access to definite proof of their nefarious schemes. Taking this proof with him he goes on the run. This is with the knowledge that he will never see his girlfriend again and that he might actually die.

Again using his superior skill and wit the IT tech devises a way to leak the proof in a way that is impossible to ignore and that keeps him out of the way of retribution long enough to make such retribution pointless.

Now it is up to the geekiest of the geeks to save the world! Those few cryptographers not yet co-opted by the evil organization are banding together to meet this threat. The fate of the world literally rests on their shoulders!

posted at: 06:03 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry