November 1, 2013
Wanna join the NSA Watch List? Write a haiku
by Kirsten Reach
Curious about the vocabulary words that the NSA flags, monitoring you as a potential terrorist? Happy to click for streams of random words formatted in three lines with a defined number of syllables on a Friday afternoon? Look no further than the NSA Haiku Generator, a single-serve site complete with unicorns and robots. Grayson Earle, who also designed Free Toilets NYC, programmed the site to look like an 8-bit video game, in sharp contrast to the words that appear in each haiku.
The robots of Tumblr are better at completing one thought or image than the NSA, since those NYT robots pull haikus from finished articles. (And technically, a haiku should establish the season, and employ juxtaposition of verbal imagery.) But this site is a simple way to educate yourself about the words the NSA is monitoring, such as “password,” “lacrosse,” or “quiche.”
A few haikus for your reading pleasure:
advisors WINGS beef
FBI Wave wire transfer
virus AMTRAK PRIME
Bubba the Love Sponge
Bob speedbump Aid Target Glock
CIA cancelled
KLM Help Swine
Kilo Class WHO SUN
internet hate Cops
Warning Typhoon Gang
smuggle Plague enigma SWAT
Retinal Fetish
secure Stranded toad
COSMOS Recruitment sneakers
sweep outage PRIME Dead
Sugar Grove Mega
passwd Food Poisoning Swine
Red Cross orthodox
Ebola Playboy
Information Warfare Watch
Hostage primacord
clone Smuggling redheads
Earthquake Emergency Aid
Chemical spill fish
Tamiflu Elvis
Tie-fighter Dock Trafficking
LLC Chelsea
Speakeasy Goodwin
Whitewater Meta-hackers
Subway Middleman
These nonsense poems have officially put MobyLives on every NSA Watch List. You’re welcome.
Kirsten Reach is an editor at Melville House.