Today's news is a major victory for the western intelligence establishment, who has been beaten down by a number of (what have been perceived as) high-level incidents of impotence or outright failures. FOCUS: When have you engaged in an intelligence-gathering exercise in your own life? Have you ever been wronged and tracked down the one who did it? Or were you just a stalker? What were your tactics and techniques? Did you dig through someone's trash? Guess their email password? What did you find out? Were you caught?
In 7th grade I tried "hacking" into a girl in my class' hotmail account (hotmail accounts being, of course, the newest, most exciting thing since Pokemon). I didn't just keep guessing, like an idiot. That's 6th grade shit. No, I cleverly went to the "reset password" option, and discovered that her password reset question was "what is my cat's name?" So, I hopped on MSN messenger (another revolutionary service) and super sleuthily managed to start a conversation where "what's your cat's name?" seemed like an appropriate question. "Rambo," she said. "g2g," I replied. It worked. My devious plan to invade her online privacy worked! Not only that, but it allowed me to discover the Holy Grail of elementary school secrets: Who she liked.
Back in school, year 4 this kid Keifer had the best collection of Pokemon cards out of the whole class. We all used to keep our shit and cards in our own trays and one day someone stole Keifers Pokemon cards. He was distraught, this kid had shiny Charizards in that pack and everything. As a clever kid, I made it my resolve to solve this great mystery. At play time, when poor Keifer was still crying, everybody started to give him a few of their spares so he could rebuild a deck. However one person was being over generous and I immediately worked out he was compensating for his guilt. I told everyone that it was that kid, but they wouldn't believe me. "He's being so nice though, a nice person wouldn't steal the cards". Failing the convey the psychology behind my suspicions I challenged the kid in front of everyone to let someone look through his things for Keifers cards. He refused and so some other kids finally got suspicious and took all his things off him. The cards were there. I wish I had a more 24esque story to tell, but alas I cannot.