Don’t Let The Smurfs Get You

 

By Mark Howell

 

 

Thanks to revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, we now know that that the NSA, an agency of the United States government, works in conjunction with the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is located in the town of Cheltenham.

 

 

 

Cheltenham is a small, 18th-century town nestled in the county of Gloucestershire in the Cotswold Hills of western England — and just happens to be the hometown of the author of Howelings.

 

 

 

It was GCHQ that sent two representatives named “Ian” and “Chris” to visit the London office of The Guardian, the UK newspaper that first spilled Snowden’s beans, and oversaw the physical destruction of the laptop computers on which Snowden’s files were kept.

 

 

 

But that visit was too late to prevent the release of news that GCHQ had developed (and unleashed) a virus codenamed WARRIORPRIDE that can be (and has been) invisibly installed on devices owned by unwitting members of the U.K. and U.S. public.

 

 

 

This particular item of spy craft comes with iPhone-specific plugins. The one that tracks your phone is codenamed TRACKER SMURF and the one that turns your phone into a microphone is codenamed, appropriately, NOSEY SMURF.

 

 

 

We now know that GCHQ, embedded in the provincial spa town of Cheltenham, has intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users since at least 2008. This surveillance program, codenamed OPTIC NERVE, gathered still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them in GCHQ and NSA databases.

 

 

 

The purpose of the program is to improve facial recognition software, for which the intelligence agencies chose images randomly and GCHQ apparently collected webcam stills from more than 1.8 million Yahoo accounts from around the world, “including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications,” according to The Guardian.

 

 

 

A new British book called “The Snowden Files” by Luke Harding reveals that news staff at The Guardian’s head office were asked by the spooks from Cheltenham to attack their personal laptops with angle-grinders and drills, then smash the hard drives and finally erase, with a “degaussing” machine, any magnetic traces of data that remained.

 

 

 

“An air of mutual incomprehension hung over that encounter,” reports Harding. The Guardian people found the GCHQ men alien: “They called them the hobbits.” But the hobbits were friendly enough, “making jokes about black helicopters and describing life in Cheltenham.” The “hobbits” obviously didn’t come down to London often. They left carrying bags of presents: Gifts for their families.

 

 

 

 

 

There was a time when the notoriety of Cheltenham rested on a true tale about P. G. Wodehouse, author of a vastly popular series of comic novels featuring Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves.

 

 

 

Raised in Cheltenham, Wodehouse took to addressing and stamping his letters and then tossing them from a fourth-floor window of his parents’ house.

 

 

 

He reasoned the British were so honest, they would pick the envelopes up and mail them for him. “Someone always saves me from going down four flights of stairs every time I want to post a letter,” he said.

 

 

 

Cheltenham’s local newspaper, The Gloucestershire Echo, recently decided to put this to the test and find out whether residents were still kind enough to do others a favor. Letters were left by staff members at bus stops, on window ledges and on café and pub tables.

 

 

 

Of the 18 letters left in public places, 15 were mailed by strangers and arrived at their destinations.

 

 

 

“This comes as no surprise,” said Cheltenham’s mayor, Wendy Flynn. “The people of Cheltenham have a tremendously kind and generous spirit. I’d like to think that this kind of thoughtful public spirit will be passed down through generations to come.”

 

 

 

Hmm. Hear that, GCHQ and NSA?

 

 

 

Quote for the Week:

 

“Dr. Egon Spengler: ‘Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psycho-kinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s sample of such energy, it would be a Twinkie 135 feet long and weighing approximately 600 pounds.’”

 

 

 

— Harold Ramis (1944-2014)

 

from “Ghostbusters”

 

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