Posted June 8, 2008

With all the furor over the NSA wiretapping of American citizens, many people are calling this a dark time in American history.

I say, "Ha."

If you want really dark times, I mean standing in the middle of Nebraska at midnight without a Coleman lantern dark times, nothing beats the 1950s. Sure, the 1860s had their Civil War, and the 1930s had their Great Depression, but what are those compared to nuclear war, total annihilation and the greatest threat to our right to privacy ever unleashed on the American people?

No, not McCarthy. He was a pussy cat. I'm talking about the extension telephone. (This was such a powerful device that, to this very day, it is only called by its code name, extension.)

The extension allowed the parents of suspected teenagers---that is, people suspected of being teenagers on the flimsy excuse of finding the letters "teen" in their ages---to---and this is important---actually listen in on their kids' telephone conversations without the need for a warrant.

By using the extension, parents knew who their kid was talking to, why their kid wanted the family car, who their kid was dating and whether those dates involved illegal substances, which in the 50s meant women, especially women with beehive hairdos.

Naturally, their children were against this kind of civil rights violation, which their parents claimed was being carried out in the name of keeping their children safe from, if you can believe this, sex (code name: temptation). Teenagers retaliated by using secret codes to communicate with each other when they knew their parents were using the extension. This is evident from this recently declassified transcript. For the sake of national security, and to protect the operational details of the extension should the 1950s ever come back, the names of the surveillance targets have been changed to Boy 1 and Boy 2. (Even this is too much information.)

Boy 1: What do you want to do Friday?

Boy 2: Can you get your old man's car?

Boy 1: He'll want to know where I'm going.

Boy 2: Tell him you need it for Sunday School.

Boy 1: It's Friday.

Boy 2: Traffic.

As you can see, the code is quite complicated and hard for parents using the extension to understand. In this case, Friday is used to refer to the last day of the school week, old man to Boy 1's father, Sunday School to a benign room where children sit with halos above their heads, and traffic to an excess number of cars attempting to occupy the same stretch of road at the same time, all going to Sunday School.

We know this now only from interviews with former teenagers. By the time the powerful NSA computers cracked the code, usually venting their frustrations by folding, bending, stapling or mutilating the occasional computer operator in the process, Friday had come and gone, the kids used the car, got drunk, had sex and didn't fill the gas tank.

So, it is no surprise, as history repeats itself and the telephone is once again a tool for the transmission of highly sensitive information, that teenagers find it necessary to draw upon techniques from the dark days of their parents' childhoods.

With the NSA making it all too easy to eavesdrop on cell phones, suspected teenagers have been forced to invent a code as cunning and baffling as those of the fifties. Here is another recently intercepted transcript between two surveillance targets, IM1 and IM2.

IM1: WHT2DOTMW?

IM2: OMSCAR?

IM1: TELHMWHT?

IM2: SNDASKL

IM1: TMWFRI

IM2: TRFK

If you know the meaning of this, please get in touch with the NSA immediately. Their computers just ordered a crate of staples.