First they came for my neighbour's lands, 

I didn't speak out because, ha ha, I never really liked the Jones.

Then they came for the   forests & I didn't speak out because, well… I am not a beaver or a deer.

Then they came for the minerals & I didn't speak out because it wasn't all mine anyway.

Then they came for my private emails & noy, am I anout to absolutely freak out!!

Fr. Anonymuller

As an Indian I have always been happy when Christopher Columbus set out to find India , he went exactly in the opposite direction and ‘discovered' America instead. Imagine, if the bugger had actually found India I would have been lying drunk on a reservation with jingling casinos around and some Apache or Sioux geek would be selling me software on a H-1B visa!

But I have always disliked Columbus also because he called the natives there ‘Indians', stole their lands and initiated a systematic genocide against their people. All of which shows what his true intentions were towards the people of India in his time!

My grouse against this Grand Daddy of European colonialism just got bigger, much bigger. Thanks to Edward Snowden – the whistleblowing CIA analyst- now we know, the progeny of Columbus in the United States are reading our bloody email, Facebook posts, monitoring our phone calls and copying secrets from our laptops. India was the fifth most tracked country by this secret data-mining programme to monitor worldwide Internet data . These guys have not stopped trying to steal stuff from the Indians a full five centuries after Columbus !! Holy Papa Fritas!

Now I really fear what they are going to do with all those billion-dollar business plans and freak-out technology ideas I had stored in my hard disk. I mean, I was waiting for an American venture capital firm to invest in my start up but now I guess another doped out, 20-something college dropout in the US will become the next Mark Zuckerberg, all with my stolen intellectual property. (Just in case you want to know, I had plans to start a social media network called ‘Assbook', assuming that the ass is worth at least twice as much as the Face. Don't believe me, huh? Which one would you save first on the day of the Apocalypse?)

And I am not willing either, to accept any of the excuses being trotted out by the Obama administration for its shocking invasion of everyone's privacy and theft of intellectual property around the globe. ‘We were protecting US security and tracking terrorists' goes the most trite explanation given out. Hmm, ‘tracking terrorists' for what? So that you could figure out how to get them on your payroll or for manipulating their activities to invade oil-rich countries and get rid of regimes you don't like? And by the way, why is the US , tail tucked between its legs, holding talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan now? The Taliban just graduated suddenly from being dreaded ‘terrorists' to valuable ‘assets'? Well, if the Taliban are not terrorists anymore then the rest of us surely are.

And here is another classic one, “Spying is not the same as hacking' said Barack Obama in an interview recently, a claim to make even a hardboiled Nigerian email scamster blush! When the Chinese do the same it is called ‘cyber hacking' – very evil indeed. When the Americans do it, everything is kosher? I know where Obama should go after he retires- straight to the ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi . He would make a greatpanda , the wily priests who make a living by conning simple rural Indian folk!

One more gem - ‘The spying is not directed at the American people'. So, everything is fine if US citizens are not targeted, is it? What about all of us out here who have been forced to become unwilling citizens of the global state being run by US governments, meddling around with the global economy and geopolitics for decades now? As a High Court judge in Chennai pronounced recently, ‘If you have consensual sex, consider it the same as getting married'. Well if you want to screw around with the rest of the world, then consider all of us American citizens- I want my social security payments now!

Almost a decade ago, I wrote a piece calling for the US to allow me, a non-citizen, to vote in their national Presidential elections. The argument then was the actions of US Presidents have such a strong impact on my life that I should have the right to vote and decide which candidate wins or loses. The request was not granted of course, so the US continues to have bimbo Presidents like George Bush Jr., snake oil salesmen like Obama and in future maybe bloodthirsty freaks like Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and so on.

Anyway, enough of the hand wringing. So hey! People of the World! What are we going to do about these thievin', lily livered Americans pilfering the last things that remain with the rest of us - our fertile imagination? Is it not time to strike back and teach these guys a lesson they will never forget? Let us do something that will spook not just their frigging spy software but also meltdown the minds of their frigging spooks! Here are five ideas to get the process rolling:

1 Pretend to be a terrorist all the time: If the Americans are going to steal our data and ideas, pretending to be ‘searching for terrorists', then the best response is to give them more terrorism than they can handle. It's easy to do too. Next time you call your beloved on the phone or write an email lace your words with liberal doses of ‘Al Qaeda' or ‘Bin Laden' or ‘Shoe Bomb'. For example you can say something like this to your girlfriend, ‘Holy Al Qaeda! Don't tell me you are pregnant again!' or while sending a mail to your mom you can write “ Dear Mom, I forgot to eat the Christmas cake you sent last year. By now I guess its Bin Laden with lots of fungi. Do you want me to post it to Obama, since you love him so much?” Or yet again chatting with a friend say stuff like, “My socks stink, now wouldn't that make a nice shoe bomb?' For greater effect put in a ‘Yeah Man' ‘I Ran' and a ‘So Molly Yah' here and there. Sure to short-circuit the US spy network.

2 Bluff them with fake technology ideas: Like a ‘Freedom Measuring Meter' for example, which when deployed in any country can, by taking in simple air samples, rank it as a democracy or a dictatorship. The needle points towards blue for the former and red in North Korea. Or yet another device the Americans will surely love to investigate for the next half a century or more is the ‘Other People's Oil Detector (OPOD)', which can tell you how much gasoline is still left in your neighbour's car and help you steal it. Here is another one- a new genetically modified virus which induces those it infects to constantly parrot “I Love America'. This last one by the way really works – the Indian PM Manmohan Singh is a well-known publicly accessible sample.

3 Get Sexy: Nothing gets the attention of spies anywhere in the world more than some citizen revealing the secrets of his private life. Even better if it is the sex life of a US Senator, Congressman or even the US President. But I am not suggesting that you post anything crude and untrue about anyone including yourself. Try getting a bit sophisticated, like the way the New York Times once described a lady whom George Bush Sr. was supposed to be having an affair with, as someone who had served the President ‘in a variety of positions'. Go ahead and freak the spymasters out with suggestive stuff- “Hey, did you see Lorena Bobbit recently on Capitol Hill, with a knife in her hand…”

4 Talk about Data: After sex, the next most exciting term that spies search for these days is ‘data'. The phrase ‘big data' is even cooler. Squeeze in the word wherever you can even if it sounds a bit phoney, “You want to be my ‘data' tonight honey?” Words like ‘Prism' and ‘Leaks' can also be used whenever possible. Especially the former with a Chinese accent, ‘Piss'em', as in ‘Lets, piss'em off!'. Or you can say, “Am going to take a Leak, need to go piss'em'. This is the kind of secret code that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are supposed to have used before they blew the cover on US covert operations around the world (or so US intelligence believes, I am told by my sources).

5 Violate the rules of the English language: This is the best way to defeat entire Empires- speak their language in your own special style and frustrate the hell out of them. Abusing the Imperialist's language is a form of non-violent resistance that is far more effective than wearing a loincloth and going to prison on a vegan diet. There is a myth in my country that the British left their Indian colony because of Gandhi and his pacifist antics. No way! They left simply because the Indians, lots of them, started speaking English- in their own peculiar idiom (very loudly too, mind it!). For how long can any human being, anywhere really bear the daily molestation of the language that he/she uses for thinking his/her most intricate thoughts? You got the point, no yaar?

The Americans themselves should know this trick, they tried language-mangling the British out of their country a couple of hundred years ago. When this did not work, as well as it should have, they finally kicked the British in the ass.

If all the five strategies I have described above don't work and the US does not stop spying on us soon the rest of the globe too may have to follow the historic American example. Look for future announcements of this project on my (Kick) Assbook page.

Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health activist based in New Delhi. He is an Associate Editor of www.countercurrents.org. He can be reached at [email protected]

Bye, Bye Ms American Spy