no phone home

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. – Benjamin Franklin

When my dad first started traveling to Egypt on business over twenty years ago, his calls home only came once a week. A phone call from Cairo to Dallas cost a pharaoh’s treasure, and so he would usually call just once a week on Saturday morning, rapidly saying hello to my brother and me, and then spending a few more minutes talking with my mom about bills and what not.

We always knew the second we picked up the phone if the call was from him or the neighbors. We would say “hello” and then listen to a long, static filled silence, followed by the strange beep of a connection being made, and then the voice of an Egyptian operator who would always say, “Hello? Cairo calling. One minute please.” Then my dad would come on the line, and the next ten minutes would be a vocal dance… stepping over each other’s words and cutting each other off trying to figure out how long the delay was as the signals crossed the Atlantic Ocean. And there was always the sound of other voices, other conversations happening on what amounted to a party line on a phone system on both continents that still had some technological glitches to shore up.

I was never allowed to have a phone in my room growing up. My dad didn’t want me doing much more in my room than studying, and a phone was considered a distraction. But, being a stubborn teenager, I worked around it. The very day his plane would take off to take him back to Cairo for the next two months I would go to his side of the bed, remove his phone and place it in my room. My mom didn’t really care because, really… she had bigger issues to deal with, and so she never said anything to either my dad or me.

One Saturday morning when I was about thirteen years old and the allure of waking up early on a Saturday morning to watch cartoons had long passed, I was still hard asleep when the phone rang at the gawd awful hour of 9:00. The ring jolted me awake and I picked up on the second ring.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”
“Hello? Cairo calling. One minute please.
Cool… Dad’s calling.
“Hey dad!”
“Omar?.... What is the phone doing in your room? Go get your mother and tell her I’m on the phone and then go put the phone back in my room.”

I think I soiled my pajamas. How the hell did he do that? I was so freaked out by his skills that I actually took out our National Geographic coffee table size atlas and figured out that he had to be at least 5,000 miles away and could still tell that I had broken the rules.

It was years later when I figured out that he had to know that at 9:00 on a Saturday morning there was no way I would be awake to answer the phone on the second ring, and that the only way I could have answered so quickly was to be sleeping next to it. I was busted by the master detective.

For the next twenty years, every time he would call from Egypt and I would answer the phone he would never say hello. He would start off with, “Were you sleeping?”

As the years went by the technology evolved enough to where he was calling my cell phone in Dallas from his cell phone in Cairo (I can’t imagine the roaming charges). And of course, with the changes came better and longer conversations… from, “How are you? Good? Good. Let me talk to your brother now, hurry,” to, “So… how are the Cowboys doing this season so far?”

But with greater technology and ease came the possibility of greater danger, and I believe we are starting to realize the jeopardy we now find ourselves in. It has been reported today (and confirmed by the government) that the National Security Agency, the largest military spy network in the world, that tens of millions of Americans phone calls are being stored and mapped out to look for “terrorist patterns.”

Of course, I am confident that the calls made from our home in suburban Dallas are on there somewhere. My parents were not only AT&T customers when this program started, but because of family and business connections we have made and received hundreds of calls from Iraq, Egypt and Syria. And with a name like ours, I’m sure that raised the red flag.

If they ever actually listened to any of those conversations I’m sure they would get either really bored or really irritated. They pretty much consist of arguing over bills to pay, why reports weren’t in on time, when school will be done, when will someone visit and the weather.

But the real issue is that someone is tracking and listening. Now I know that there are many out there who will say that this is a necessary evil to make sure “we don’t get attacked again.” But this country supposedly prides itself on not being like other places in the world where the general populace has to always be looking over the shoulders.

The irony is that as our government monitors phone calls to fight terrorists and wars to bring democracy to Iraq, my father and family would never say anything of any real importance over the phone because the Iraqi government under Sadaam used to monitor and listen to all phone conversations. We are slowly becoming the very regime we have killed to overthrow.

And if anyone doubts the danger in what is happening, remember that once the government puts something in motion and it goes unchecked, it becomes a monster that cannot be stopped. How do we know this? Here’s an easy example that affects everyone: The IRS was created during WWII to help pay for the war effort with the promise that it was a temporary measure to help defend liberty.

How much did you pay in taxes this year?