NSA’s data miners dredge up -- cheating husbands?

This is for those people -- and you know who you are -- who cavalierly dismissed my slippery slope argument on the NSA’s secret surveillance program: I told you so!

Here it is, ripped from Friday’s headlines: “Too tempting? NSA watchdog details how officials spied on love interests.”

And I know it’s true because I got if from the Internet -- in this case Fox News no less; or more specifically, FoxNews.com’s Jake Gibson, who reported:

In a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, NSA Inspector General George Ellard admitted that since 2003, there have been “12 substantiated instances of intentional misuse” of “surveillance authorities,” and “SIGINT,” or signals intelligence.

Just about all of these cases involve an NSA employee spying on a girlfriend, boyfriend or some kind of love interest, or “loveint.” Media reports had earlier claimed NSA workers were engaged in this kind of activity. The letter to Grassley gave specific details for the first time.

Take that, President Obama! Take that, CIA director/national intelligence chief guys! Take that, Senate intelligence committee yahoos! Take that, my skeptical wife!

So what are we talking about here? Here’s one example from Gibson’s report:

A female NSA employee admitted in 2004 to tapping a telephone number she found in her husband’s cell phone “because she suspected that her husband had been unfaithful.” In this case the NSA employee resigned before any disciplinary action.

As Keith Jackson would say, “Whoa Nellie!”

Ed Snowden may have blown the first whistle, but Gibson’s story is a real foghorn. It’s exactly what we skeptics have feared all along: Give a spook an inch and he’ll listen in on your pillow talk. Data mining? Metadata? More like hanky-panky mining and “who ya meetin’?” data.

What’s that, you say? I’m not cheating on my husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, so why should I care? That this is just a case of a few bad NSA apples? An innocent example of what happens when “SIGINT” crosses computer chips with “loveint”?

OK, sure. Be Pollyanna. Be Pangloss. Just don’t be late for dinner. Don’t text, or email, or phone that special “friend.” Because someone out there just might be watching.

And the next time you come home late, the little woman may be there to greet you not in a black teddy but in a black helicopter.

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