WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – It didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after the expiry of the Patriot Act provisions allowing the collection of everybody’s telecommunications metadata, the disasters warned of by the Administration and Congressional leaders began to unfold.
“We warned you,” said a White House official, who asked to remain anonymous because that’s the only way he was authorized to speak to the media. “We said that ending metadata surveillance would increase the danger, and the danger has in fact increased. We have been listening to overseas terrorists – that’s still legal – and they all say they are going to step up their activities, especially the secret ones.”
And that wasn’t all. A similarly anonymous Department of Hellfire or Surveillance (DHS) official, who warned last week that letting the Patriot Act expire would be “like playing Russian roulette,” pointed out: “Luckily, we’ve survived so far: the first chamber in the Russian roulette pistol was empty – probably because of the metadata collection up to midnight on 31 May. But that initial good luck increases the chance that the next chamber will have a bullet in it. And remember: there are only five chambers left, if it’s a six-shooter we’re playing with.”
In Congress, there was little reaction in the House of Rumpelstiltskins, because all of the Republican members were out of town, visiting early Presidential primary states. However, in the Senate, the Majority Tweedle, Much McCoalface, said that the Senate had “unilaterally disarmed” the country in its war against terrorism, and that if the terrorists didn’t sportingly agree to a truce until the United States had rearmed, the Pentagon should bomb everything in sight, and everything hidden as well.
Senator McCoalface added that the failure of the Senate to extend a law that had already been dropped by the House of Rumpelstiltskins, declared invalid by the courts, and hand-washed by the White House “has done possibly irreparable damage to our Constitutional separation of powers.”
Asked by a reporter whether the Senate’s inability to do anything might indicate “that 60 out of 100 for a majority is not very good arithmetic,” McCoalface declined to reply, as did Minority Tweedle Harvey Pooka.
Meanwhile, a large number of domestic and international flights of US airlines were not hijacked or blown up, although a large proportion of them were delayed as DHS security officials at airports insisted on viewing randomly all the records of the last 24 hours’ phone calls on the mobile phones of all boarding passengers.
Off the record, the DHS indicated that it had uncovered a plot to slip through the metadata gap and carry out a terrorist attack by Alwaze bin Baddi, who has already carried out nine successful suicide attacks. “A few more days like this and we’re devastated,” said the predictably anonymous official, who declined to say how the plot had been uncovered without the assistance of metadata. “If we get through a week without a successful terrorist attack, people might start taking a closer look at our budget.”
Fortunately, however, the USA Flimflam Act, changing the titles of the people who collect the bulk metadata, was passed and signed by the President before a week had gone by.
Still, all involved agreed anonymously that it had been a very close call.
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