Pwned and played: Big Brother is toying with our privacy

I was hoping to riff directly off Tuesday’s State of the Union address, but since President Obama mentioned my pet peeve only once in passing, there’s not enough to say. In his words:

That’s why, working with this Congress, I will reform our surveillance programs because the vital work of our intelligence community depends on public confidence, here and abroad, that privacy of ordinary people is not being violated.

Dude, you need new advisers. That ship sailed, hit an iceberg, and sank. That four-piece ensemble playing the strings while Leonardo DiCaprio froze to death? That was our personal privacy. When Obama’s policies address reality, then I can skewer him. For now, he has serious catching up to do — maybe start here.

I already complained a couple of times when it came out that the NSA had little gnome mages running around World of Warcraft looking for al-Qaida fanatics holding secret online meetings beneath the Bridge of Souls. Now it’s out that our multi-billion-dollar intelligence community has been raiding Angry Birds to find out where you’re playing, whom you’re playing with, and what their contact information might be, as well as when and how often you talk to them on your secure-as-Swiss-cheese mobile device.

Part of the story includes the British version of the NSA. Apparently the folks going through the reams of documents that Edward Snowden leaked to the world have finally dug deep enough to find evidence of Smurfgate.

Big Brother is smurfing you

According to Snowden’s docs analyzed by the Guardian, when the British spy techs who work for the GCHQ (Britain’s NSA equivalent) come up with new recipes for hacking into our private lives, they give them cute Smurf names — probably because they hate everything American, especially Disney, which means dwarf names are out. Instead, when they come up with a new hack tool, like a hyper-accurate geo-locator that knows when and where you’re on the throne, they’ll call it something like Tracker Smurf. For Warcraft, it’s probably Frodo Smurf, and for Angry Birds it’s likely Birdy Smurf or Ha Ha We’re Screwing You Smurf.

All this is, of course, blindingly ironic coming out at pretty much the same time as Data Privacy Day — and the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, for that matter. Forget that part where I said you might want to think before accessing your bank account from your mobile device. Instead, take the damn thing in the backyard and light it on fire. Then get a Blackphone, though that’s probably a red herring secretly funded by the NSA and sharing information with a litany of three-letter acronyms, including the CIA, the IRS, and TMZ.

Really, that’s too simple an explanation. I don’t think that’s what they’re doing at all. Wherever the NSA’s vaunted hacker battalion is festering, it’s undoubtedly several floors of a warehouse-sized office building covered in grayed-out windows, powered by massive generators, decorated with action figures, littered with Jolt cans and zit cream, and equipped with enough parsed bandwidth even a Ritalin-deprived flibbertigibbet wouldn’t complain. That’s a gamer’s paradise.

The spy who pwned me

My theory: The NSA brass doesn’t know it, but they aren’t actually spying on us. They hired the best and the brightest from engineering schools the world over, but failed to filter for online gaming addiction. Suddenly a bunch of rabid MMOG and console addicts have an unlimited budget and find they’re being managed by old-timey NSA supervisors who’ll believe just about anything is a viable intelligence target as long as you can access it from a cave with a broadband connection.

They did what any self-respecting gamer geek would do in that situation: They built the biggest honking game system of all time, and now they’re playing their hearts out while charging billable hours. The fact that they’re probably selling our contact information to marketing firms on the side to pad those anemic federal pensions is gravy.

Gamer geeks gone wild

This begs the question of what else we might soon discover the NSA has crawled into. Given the gamer geek theory, online pizza delivery sites are undoubtedly compromised. I figured technology retailers like ZipZoomFly were toast too until I remembered these guys are enjoying an unlimited budget — they’re probably buying customized Logitech gamer gear from Haliburton at $6,000 a joystick.

What else is fair, er, game? Information from escort sites is being mainlined into NSA HQ by now, and if you’re a woman changing in a dressing room that’s even near a security camera, make sure to wave because you’re likely being simulcast in HD to our nation’s online answer to James Bond. That poor fool on Tindr has to stay in shape and practice flirting so that he could seduce women. Our sad spies hit the power button, and drool lasciviously over their multiple monitors.

Frankly, this constant stream of rectally invasive privacy revelations is making me tired. Tilting at windmills or howling at the moon doesn’t do this feeling justice. Public confidence that we ordinary citizens aren’t having our privacy violated? That’s pretty bald-faced even for a politician.