Yankee spies are rubbish, says Senate

Or are they?

A Senate report into everybody's favourite snoopers the NSA has said that despite it having been given loads of money it is lagging behind in its spying prowess and has been "slow to adapt" to modern technological advances.

"The National Security Agency is America's most important asset for technical collection of terrorism information, yet it is losing its capability to target and exploit the modern communications systems used by terrorists, seriously weakening the NSA's ability to warn of possible attacks," said a report by the Senate Committee on Intelligence.

And this is despite the NSA being giving a truckload of extra money to do just that, the report continues. Although, of course, the actual NSA budget is top secret (estimates put it at $30 billion).

You may not have heard of the NSA, but it will have heard of you because it makes it its business to spy on everyone and everything it can. It has a wide range of expensive spying kit to pick up every sort of signal imaginable and has been accused of slipping backdoor spying devices in software among other things.

However, this hasn't stopped American embassies being blown up in Kenya and Tanzania, the Senate complains. It's all got too complicated what with computers and everything. "Today we must still deal with terrorists, insurgents, and others who have hundreds of years of history fuelling their cases. But the chances are they will be using laptop computers, sophisticated encryption, and weaponry their predecessors could not even have imagined," said the report.

The NSA is particularly narked about the availability of super-strong encryption software, which makes its job of sticking its nose in everywhere much harder. It spent years making it against the law but has lost the battle. Oh well.

The problem, see, with giving the NSA the power and technology to access every bit of information it may need for terrorists and the like is that to do so, the common people's civil rights invariably have to be cut, dried, rolled up and smoked. And we don't like that.

Of course, this could all be an elaborate ruse to get even more money - "Rebuilding the NSA is the committee's top priority," says the report. With even more money, they could take over the world. Brohahahahahahaha. ®