America, The Sexy Fascist State

I like to picture it, if I have to picture it at all, as some sort of giant, low-lit converted warehouse, loosely staffed with a haphazard gaggle of scraggy, perpetually hung-over former frat guys and ex-cops and disgruntled former bank tellers all staring numbly at banks of 10-year-old black-and-white Dell monitors set about in a scattershot array of worn gray cubicles, all smelling of stale coffee and overloaded electrical outlets and tiny lost dreams.

They are wary, these government workers, these data miners. They are jaded, burned out, sighing heavily. After all, they know it's all some big in-joke, this supposedly ominous government surveillance thing, all the cameras and the wiretapping and the Internet scouring. I mean, isn't it?

And the joke only got worse when they were all hired en masse by a nebulous substrata of the sprawling and highly ineffective Department of Homeland Security to somehow sift through 10,000 hours of random urban surveillance-camera footage every week and 2 million Web site histories and countless witless phone conversations all of people chatting annoyingly about, you know, work, and relationships, and how tired they are, and how drunk they got last night, and nothing much at all, right alongside endless digital video of citizens walking around picking their noses and scratching their butts and looking confused and happy and miserable and lost and found and occasionally smoking a joint or buying porn or stealing a pack of gum or parallel parking very, very poorly. Fun! San Francisco Chronicle