If I am the first person to tell you this, I am sorry for the news that you're about to read. Someone is Watching you. If I am the first person to tell you that, shouldn't you be finger painting instead of reading, because you must only be 5 years old and blissfully ignorant of the world. It's no secret that you're being watched closely. And I'm not even coming at this from a conspiracy theory, the-lizard-men-are-trying-to-control-us point of view, we all know how I feel about conspiracies. I am coming at this from the angle of 'wow, this actually made the news?'

Since May, we have been treated to the spectacular fireworks display of Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's surveillance of everyone within cooee of anything so basic as two cans and a piece of string. There has been a huge political fallout, and the world media is going more nuts than an ice-cream sundae in an adult film. There have been countries that are generally considered as 'friends' throwing empty threats around like its 3 o'clock at the pacifists school bike shed, but from where I am sitting, none of this makes any sense. But we'll get back to that later. Now that I have your attention, I am going on a bit of a tangent, using my superior Wikipedia research skills to find out some useless facts and draw out the post a little longer. Oh, hey there Mr. NSA employee man reading this. Having a nice day? I only ask because I imagine that no one asks. It must get lonely reading other people's emails all day.

There's some serious shit going down on the Tennis Court I swear....

Wide spread surveillance and spying aren't exactly new or secret. As you probably know, in ancient New Zealand, the movements of everyone in Middle Earth were tracked and surveyed from the All-seeing Eye of Sauron. Even in 1949, the idea of a Big Brother State was extracted by the Thought Police from the brain of George Orwell and published in a fictional novel to pull a double bluff and distract the population from just how true it was. So in various ways mass surveillance has been an aspect of everyday life for a long time. However, it wasn't until the rise of telecommunications that mass surveillance became simple and relatively effective for governments and organisations to employ.

During the Cold War (wow that has to be the single most discussed topic on Talkin' Smack, doesn't it?) the United States, in cooperation with the United Kingdom, developed a system called ECHELON that was originally designed to intercept long-distance short-wave radio transmissions coming from the Soviet Union. However, after the advent of the space satellite and global communications, these 'listening stations' were converted to intercept the newer, funkier, signals with automatic cruise control that were bouncing around the atmosphere. After the Cold War had run its course and the big wigs in all the military bases got bored of all those little wars without big explosions, attention turned to the monitoring of communications from anyone and everyone, not just the pesky Ruskies. This monitoring really stepped up a notch following the September 11 attacks, when everything from reading emails to pre-opening beer bottles to know the answers to the questions that were printed on the caps became justifiable because of 'national security' reasons.

Since then, it has been revealed, thanks to the former CIA and NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, that the NSA got quite good at the surveillance game and in 2007 instigated a program called PRISM, to track and monitor internet, phone and corporate data from private and commercial sources. In other words, they know what kinds of dirty Brazilian midget vomit porn you were watching on Thursday night.

But the thing is, that shouldn't surprise anyone. It would hardly take anything to flag some kind of hit word in a data mining filter. Hell, I'm sure I've used just about every hit word in my writing, and I've only been doing this for a year. And since the internet was invented there have been cases of police tracking crims through their data. And if the Queensland police can do it, then there's no telling what an organised crime fighting organisation could do; the sky would be the limit.

And with every government spying on every other government, I don't think that anyone has the right to act all surprised about it. If, in your own intel gathering, you failed to recognise that someone else could be watching you, then either they aren't, or your intel gathering abilities are akin to my ability as a professional lacrosse player.

And the news is playing it off as if the government is going rogue, taking away our personal rights and privacy, as if the media is some bastion of hope and civil liberty. May I remind you all of the News Ltd phonetapping thing? I'm willing to bet that they weren't the only one's doing it. They're just dumb enough to get caught. So, news media, stop reporting about the whole PRISM, Edward Snowden, surviellance thing, unless something significant actually happens, like it turns out that there was another ending to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that the government hid from us.