Big Brother & a Secret Weapon

Now that it's fairly easy to spy on people, since they publish everything about themselves on the internet anyway, it seems unlikely that anyone still has mail duty.  Possibly nobody ever had mail duty, but in my youth I had plenty of friends who suspected that their letters were steamed open an read.  (Come to think of it, somebody probably should've been reading their mail.)  There was also a theory that the letters were carefully extracted with a disposable wooden chopstick. Even though the chopstick method was shown to me, by a conspiracy theorist who frequently ate dinner at our house, I still had a little doubt about people in some basement office somewhere using this time consuming method to spy on me.

But now.... now we can get somewhere with this.  I'm pretty sure that spies just use computers now (I don't know if this is true for my Russian readers...  thanks by the way for being the #1 nationality that reads my blog... what's wrong with my fellow countrymen?).  We can totally get around this.  If you were to plot something nefarious, but do it the old school way, I think you could do it under the radar.  So here are some tips:

• Talk to people in person.  I realize that you can't get the same huge audience that Twitter can, but it really makes an impression to have a little face time with a person.  Also, you can deny everything later.
• Write letters.  Yes, we can save the Post Office and be sneaky at the same time.

A bonus that comes with writing letters was pointed out by my cousin Bruce:  In the days of letter writing, if you got drunk one night and wrote letters to people, you still had to mail them in the morning when you were sober and could think better of it.  Now, you just hit "send" while you're still drunk and the recipient reads it the next morning when you are sober.  You can see the advantage of a waiting period.