Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach

For months the NSA and its defenders kept insisting we were all overreacting. The surveillance isn’t that bad. Go buy an ice cream. Barack Obama delivered this message with the practiced ease of someone who genuinely believes the audience is too stupid to notice the gap between what’s said and what’s done.

Then they launched a spy satellite into orbit—one explicitly designed to make mass surveillance easier—and put a giant octopus strangling the entire planet on the side of the rocket. The motto: Nothing is beyond our reach. I’ve been turning this over trying to figure out which interpretation is worse. Option one: it’s a joke, which means the people running the most powerful intelligence apparatus in human history think this whole thing is funny. Option two: it’s not a joke, which means they’ve stopped pretending entirely. They know we know. They’ve decided it doesn’t matter because we can’t do anything about it anyway. Either way—great. Fine. Wonderful.