A Lighter Side of the NSA Mess

The other day, I was driving down Massachusetts Avenue talking on my car's speaker phone system to Rajesh De, general counsel of the National Security Agency. Raj had called me on my Google Voice phone number. Google Voice is an excellent free service from Google that enables you to have one phone number that rings as many or as few of your actual phones as you set it to do. For me, it's something of a godsend: my Google number reaches me on my cell, my office line, and my home office line all at the same time. In my experience, Google Voice has exactly one downside (other than an audio quality slightly below that of a standard land-line): It has this call-recording feature with a strange tendency to turn itself on sua sponte. To comply with varying state laws on call recording, moreover, the system announces itself audibly whenever it starts recording a call. So every now and then, out of nowhere, you'll be talking to someone and the line will declare abruptly in an automated voice, "This call is being recorded"---with an odd and somewhat ominous emphasis on the word "this." And so it came pass, as I was driving past the Islamic Center during the morning rush hour that my phone announced that Raj and my call---and not just its metadata---was being captured on the computers a very big and powerful entity. There was a long pause, before Raj asked: "Is that my end or yours?" I explained to him about my Google Voice number and this odd quirk in the system. There was another long pause. "Let me get this straight," Raj asked. "Google is accidentally recording audio contents, and we have a problem?"