We’re pleased as POG to present our latest guest post; this one is a satirical essay very much in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Our featured writer is Peter Van Buren, author of Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.

This essay first appeared on his website WeMeantWell.

Citing an endless river of filth, vacuous conversations, idiotic Tweets and endless cat videos, the NSA announced it is “freaking done” with spying on Americans.

The NSA decision came only hours after thousands of analysts, following similar threats at CIA, said they planned to quit and apply for jobs as Apple Geniuses and Best Buy Geek Squad workers.

Speaking on background, one disgruntled NSA employee said “Go ahead, throw me in jail for an Espionage Act violation, that would be better than doing this job. Right after 9/11, my boss said we had to start monitoring all Americans’ electronic communications to find terrorists. So we did, plugging into Google for tens of thousands of personnel at NSA, and those two interns we assigned to Bing. At first we thought it was an anomaly that 64 percent of all Internet traffic was flowing to ‘BarelyLegalCheerleaders.com’ but the numbers tracked. Most of the rest of the web was shopping during work hours.”

“And is all you talk about on your cells where you are and what you are doing at that second? Where was the ‘Mohammed, now we blow up the bridge and avenge the brothers’ stuff? No, instead it was 24/7 ‘I’m, yeah, at the mall. I might get an Orange Julius. LOL.’ You people even pronounce the term ‘LOL’ out loud as ‘lull’ as if it was a real word. Do you know what it’s like to listen to that all day? I’d rather clean the toilets at NSA but that job was already filled by some guy named Mohammed who didn’t even have a Facebook.”

“Hacking into the TOR network was also a disappointment. We expected dirty bomb recipes and blueprints of government buildings being passed around, but instead it was all selfies from ComiCon, Hunger Games fan fiction, and terabytes of cat videos pumped out of Russia by Ed Snowden. That guy really has some free time since blowing the whistle on the NSA. Hah, and now we’re getting out of the domestic spying mission and the dude’s still trying to get NewEgg to ship to a Moscow address. Now that’s a proper LOL.”

“Still we didn’t give up. Thinking all this Internet wastage was some sort of elaborate al Qaeda spoof, we really drilled down. Our conclusion as briefed to the White House: What the hell is wrong with these people? They spend all day looking at the most disgusting images ever created by humankind, really, really sick stuff. Even the jihadis we were trying to blackmail for looking at porn mostly stayed on meh celebrity bikini sites. The people assigned to the American division now all have PTSD and are in desensitization therapy. NSA even had to create a classified commendation medal to award them just to limit potential workplace-violence and OSHA lawsuits.”

After a series of late-night meetings between worker reps from NSA and CIA, it was decided to threaten a mass walk-off if high-level action was not taken.

“Initially the brass were all whining about national security and no more 9/11′s, but then we showed them some of the actual websites you people spend your time looking at. And from work, too. During the day in Washington DC alone 98 percent of the web traffic is from .gov addresses. We see a bunch of those people trying to access The Intercept, Firedoglake and Wikileaks, get blocked by the firewalls, and then spend the next 45 minutes figuring out a way around the software to get to ‘BuffDudes.com’ for the next half hour.”

“After the bosses saw that, they immediately agreed to the changes requested. Hayden even entered the Cone of Silence and burped up his lunch. And you should see the garbage that guy looks at online for fun. I mean, we did. Whatever.”

“So,” stated the official NSA spokesperson on background, “until you morons clean up your filthy minds and start planning terrorist stuff online, we will no longer be able to afford the human cost of spying on you. Heck, even if al Qaeda blew up Chicago, about two-thirds of you wouldn’t even notice as long as YouTube stayed online.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security stated her agency would continue to monitor every bit of web traffic, claiming the staff could not get enough of this stuff, and that many airport screeners had volunteered free overtime.

Featured image Eye Spy via Emory Allen on Flickr