BUNKER #23, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION — Phillip Espion is an employee of National Security Agency, working in a secret bunker at an undisclosed location. Espion’s job duties are to monitor and regulate the network traffic at the NSA’s highly secretive Utah compound that houses untold terabytes of data collected from the phone calls, text messages and emails of every person in America who happens to use a cell phone or computer. Espion was taking his lunch break when The Political Garbage Chute caught up with him, and we wanted to know his feelings on EmailGhazi — the newest outrage from America’s right-wing of politics involving Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State.
“Mostly, I find it hilarious,” Espion said as he sipped his Cup O’ Noodles. “I mean, did no one read the reporting that Greenwald did on Snowden for chrissakes?” Espion was referring to Glen Greenwald’s reporting last year as he covered the story of Edward Snowden, another former NSA agent now on the run from the U.S. government after orchestrating the release of thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the massive spying apparatus the federal government employs. “I mean, we have been just vacuuming up every single scrap of data the Internet affords us from emails to Tinder requests, and people are freaking out because Hillary used her own server? It makes me laugh my balls off, actually.”
Espion told our reporter that “as long as Hillary sent the email” the NSA would “snatch it up.” He explained that “just because an email server is privately owned, that doesn’t mean that emails sent from it wouldn’t be archived on either the server itself, or the recipient’s email server.” Espion explained that to him, the scandal is that “so many people don’t get how email works” and that if they did “they’d understand that once it gets out into the Internet, that email is going to get picked up” by the NSA.
“Let’s put it this way,” Espion said as he washed his lunch down with a store brand ginger ale, “the only way to keep communications from being seen, heard or read by us is to not let them ever hit the Internet. Why do you think people like Bill Clinton have sent just a couple of emails in their lives?” Espion says that while he sympathizes with the concerns over the appropriateness of a cabinet member using a non-official state email address he doesn’t think “people should get their panties in a bunch over it” because according to him “we, the NSA, see everything.”
“I mean, this really couldn’t be more of a ‘no duh’ situation if it tried,” said Espion as he finished up his lunch and got ready to go back to the network operation center. “Basically Hillary wanted to be lazy and not look like a big nerd carrying two devices. So instead of putting two different email accounts on her Blackberry, she kept using her old email address. I mean, that just sounds like a grandma not wanting to learn how to operate a tech device with a new feature, not a political scandal to me,” Espion told us. “Call me crazy, but I’m more concerned about whether Hillary would still be in the back pocket of the financial sector and the military industrial complex before I’d be so worried about whether or not we can track what she emailed to government officials.
I promise you, we can and have tracked every email that private server of hers sent. It’s in an archive; our archive actually. Maybe you’ll never see those emails, but guess what? You’ll never see all your emails we have stored here either. But I know, that doesn’t concern you either, right America?” Espion finished his Cup O’ Noodles and ginger ale, punched the clock, and walked back to the server monitoring room, where he worked another four hours, watching emails be sucked up and dumped into the massive, secret archive that collects every American’s digital communications under the guise of “national security.”
