In the last few weeks, it has been revealed that the National Security Agency has the technology to sweep up our cellphone records and Internet data, including emails, in its hunt for terrorists. At first I thought, “So what? I’m not a jihadist. I’m not taking a ‘vacation’ in Pakistan. Go ahead; check out all the phone records you want, my emails too. Hope they don’t put you to sleep.”
But now, after reviewing some of the calls I have made in the last couple of weeks, as well as my emails, I am starting to worry. Could I be in for a knock on the door?
Nobody knows exactly how the NSA electronic surveillance program works — it’s classified — but if it picks up on keywords, “trouble” might be my word of the day.
Do you remember the movie “Three Days of the Condor”? Robert Redford plays a CIA researcher who returns from lunch one day to find all his co-workers shot dead. Turns out that Redford’s character, by stitching together coded words from various books, had discovered a plot within the CIA to obtain the world’s oil supply.
Could the NSA program stitch together some kind of nefarious plot from my cellphone conversations and emails? Was my wireless making unknown connections? What would the NSA deduce from a phone conversation like this? (Which is not mine. Really, not mine.)
Me: “Hangover 3” was a real bomb.
Friend: Absolutely. It wasn’t even as good as “Airplane II.”
Me: They get totally wasted again.
Friend: Kind of makes you angry.
If having “real,” bomb” “airplane,” “totally wasted” and “angry” in one conversation isn’t enough, what if the conversation turns — as it so often does — to how your kids (not my kids, but kids like mine) are doing?
Me: Last week, our youngest visited his girlfriend in Long Beach.
Friend: Josh left today on a Birthright trip to Israel.
Me: What airline?
Friend: El Al. They have great security.
Just to keep track, we have in a really innocuous conversation (remember, it’s not mine) the words “bomb,” “airplane,” “totally wasted,” “Israel” and “security” all in one call.
Beginning to get sweaty, I started rifling, I mean searching, through recent emails. (Not my emails. But ones like the kind I send. R-a-n-d-o-m emails. I write about all kinds of stuff, and it’s all really quite harmless, honest.) For example, in just one week’s worth of “emails,” I found the words “Hamas,” which was a typo from a piece I was writing about hummus, and an email blast (not “blast,” more like a “puff”) inviting me to attend a Talmud study group on the tractate Pe’ah at a nearby Starbucks.
I needed no cyber-cryptographer to realize that the plot (as well as the hummus) had thickened. To the cool logic of a NSA computer that would be connecting the dots — like on some restaurant placemat for kids — of the keywords from my phone calls and emails, I was the spymaster of a sinister plan — “talmudic” in its intricacy. Clearly, Hamas was planning an attack on a Starbucks. They would enter the country at Long Beach, throwing off the Coast Guard by appearing wasted. (Or perhaps escaping detection by being short-waisted?)
The only question left unanswered was which Starbucks? It was obvious: pe’ah is Hebrew for “corner.” But which corner? Scanning the keywords in my mind’s eye, the El Al logo popped into view. Suddenly, it all came together — the target was a Starbucks on the corner of “L” and ALbert” streets.
Edmon J. Rodman is a JTA columnist who writes on Jewish life from Los Angeles. Contact him at [email protected].