Note to self: do not cheat on employees of the National Security Agency. The NSA is in more hot water after it was revealed that a few heart-broken agents spied on their lovers. The violation is apparently common enough to earn its own bureaucratic code, “LOVEINT”
“When we make mistakes, we detect, we correct and we report,” said NSA Chief Compliance Officer Justin DeLong in a conference call addressing the recent revelation that the NSA has violated its own privacy rules thousands of times. Though, they claim that major infractions like targeted, unlawful spying are rare (most are typo errors that cause the wrong people to be queried).
While disturbing, the revelation isn’t exactly a surprise. I would happily take a bet that unrequited love has caused egregious abuses of power in every intelligence agency — in the past and into the foreseeable future (it was even the plot line for James Cameron’s 1994 spy rom-com, True Lies).
True to form, Twitter had its own fun with the #NSAPickUpLines hashtag:
Personally, I turned to Saturday Night Live; I imagine the spying went a little something like this: