David Byrne from a concert last year. Photo by Francis Chung.
David Byrne—the former Talking Heads frontman—recently wrote a pair of editorials blasting New York’s pricey economy full of one-percenters and how the Internet is ruining music. He’s now taking aim at a different issue: The National Security Agency.
More specifically, how the NSA is after us all.
In a recent essay, titled “A Tangled Web We Weave,” posted on his web site, Byrne outlines what classified info about the NSA he thinks will be revealed next and how he believes that “all of our credit cards and passwords will have been hacked.”
I think one of the next revelations will be that all of our credit cards and passwords will have been hacked by the NSA. Nothing else is secure from their prying eyes and they will undoubtedly say that they need to track banking and other transfers of funds that might be supporting terrorism. They might say they only do this to “targets”—but we now know we are all targets.
He then predicts that, when this information becomes public, most of Europe and Latin America will cut online ties with us, causing a huge financial freakout, leaving us to have to “fend for ourselves.” A sort of financial “Judgement Day,” if you will:
Europeans and Latin Americans will inevitably sever their online ties with the US and UK as quickly as they can, if they haven’t already. Naturally, the big tech companies who rely on secure financial transactions will freak out. However, as their own business models are based on tracking our viewing, buying and social behavior, their outrage will have a limit. It will only go as far as it needs to protect their own interests. The rest of us will have to fend for ourselves. They are, after all, the ones who gave our information to the NSA—they have denied this, but it seems obvious.
The takeaway from all this? Well, if Byrne is correct, we’re all fucked. Since nearly all businesses operate online, that means they’re in trouble. And since we (“the little lambs that we are,” Byrne says) as customers, trusted and use those businesses for our everyday lives, we’re also fucked. “Imagine someone gets into office and wants to destroy their perceived enemies,” Byrne writes, “by rounding them up as persons of interest or maybe just slowly wiping clean their bank accounts.” Well they can do this because, according to Byrne, our Social Security numbers and credit card numbers will be compromised by the NSA.
Of course, this all sounds like some late night conspiracy theory talk show fodder. “I sound incredibly paranoid now,but aren’t we almost there?” Byrne concludes in his essay. Well, at least he’s a little self-aware at how ridiculous he sounds.
