WASHINGTON – The latest shocking release from the Snowden leaks has revealed that the National Security Agency has been stealing the biographical details of American citizens for use in the plots of coming-of-age novels aimed at young adults.
Critics have already hailed the NSA’s works as ‘instant classics of the Bildungsroman genre’ that track the age-old journey of individuals from the naive expectation of privacy to the mature acceptance of constant, warrantless observation.
“Considering that we keep lying to congress, there’s a very real possibility that they’re going to defund us at some point,” said Michael Rogers, NSA director and co-author of The Heart That Breaks Inside. “So our new funding strategy is to write a series of bestselling drama/romance novels using the intensely personal and private real correspondences of Americans.”
Although civil liberties watchdogs have expressed discomfort about the NSA’s insistence on using the actual names, addresses and and medical details of the people mentioned in the novel, former CIA director Michael Hayden insists it is a matter of national security.
“The Fourth Amendment doesn’t say anything about a national agency not being allowed to write citizens into novels about how difficult a time adolescence can be,” said Hayden, who has recently released an anthology of love poems that citizens have been too afraid to send. “If these achingly confidential online confessions and nude photographs can help keep Americans safe, somehow, then the intelligence community has a duty to publish them.”
This is not the first time the intelligence community has used the private communications of American citizens as grist for the artistic mill.
In 1975, the Church Senate Committee discovered that the CIA had been going through people’s mail in an attempt to find new recipes for their semi-annual dinner party.
