28 October 1999
Temping at Echelon
Johnny Werd stole a lot of copies the summer he temped
at Echelon and hoped he didn't get caught, hoped nobody was monitoring
the copymachines access codes, tracking copies. He always had such fantasies
though. The paranoia kept him awake. He would use the company computer
to search for the most subversive websites he could. His group supervisor
Linda Thompson probably wouldn't have cared. There were spooks in and
out of the office at all times, always someone acting suspiciously,
a stranger in a suit with a wire in his ear, military haircuts. FBI
CIA NSA IRS ATF BATF DOD, Werd didn't know or care. These odd men of
the Echelon taskforce, living vicariously through the lives of more
interesting men, living at the shadowy intersection of the extreme potentials
of law and technology. Those they spied on practiced the arts of terrorism,
insurrection, revolution, espionage. Moving without detection or fear,
remaining invisible, shadows moving through the grid. Werd hated it
there. He sometimes brought drugs, guns, or bombs to work, just for
the kick. Once he brought in an AK47 assault rifle in a dufflebag, kept
it in his cubicle, and looked his boss directly in the eye when she
stood before his desk and handed him copies of the Posse Comitatus Act,
the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and requested that 1000 copies
be sent out to all employees. Werd pinned a photo of Malcolm X over
his telephone. Working there he had seen pass through the office at
various times Oliver North, George Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al
Gore, even, once, he was sure, Vince Foster. Once, when retrieving some
files from the S cabinet he found files labeled SPECIAL FORCES, SPECIAL
OPERATIONS, SPECIAL OPS... Sometimes he used the phone to play prank
calls on strangers drawn at random from the phonebook or from the NASA
directory, and he would babble on and on to them about Ruby Ridge and
David Koresh of the Branch-Davidians who died in the standoff at Waco,
Texas a year before the Oklahoma City bombing , or the Whitewater Scandal
and its relation to Iran-Contra. The voices he ranted at over the phone
were variously upset or interested or bemused, but none of them found
any of it the least bit credible.
At the end of the summer he was fired for making unauthorized
photocopies.
