Obama: NSA to refocus away from terrorists

President Barack Obama announced today a fundamental restructuring of the mission of the National Security Administration. "In the searching conversations we have been holding over the proper goals for government surveillance, we've come to a new realization. This week the American people have spoken: it's not 2002 anymore. Few still care about hunting terrorists. What the public now wants is the hunting down of racists. By any means necessary."

The President previewed a variety of new NSA initiatives, such as data-mining the petabyte of private phone calls and emails stored in the Utah Data Center for evidence of Americans engaging in racial stereotyping, evincing a lack of personal enthusiasm for blacks, or being insufficiently outraged at Donald T. Sterling.

Mr. Obama issued an executive order retroactively abolishing any state laws, such as California's, that make illegal the surreptitious recording of private conversations. "Today, we enter a new age of transparency," announced the President during the signing ceremony.

Also, the federal government has already worked out agreements with Google and Apple so that yesterday's updates to their smartphone operating systems included a previously unannounced feature that silently turns on the phone at random intervals and sends any conversations overheard to Fort Meade for racism analysis. More than one hundred million hours were successfully collected in the first day and are currently being processed by NSA supercomputers.

The NSA will also collect in real-time all security camera footage from shops and public places. CIA lip-reading and facial-recognition software will determine who is making racially insensitive remarks. "Racists will arrive home from the mall to find the paparazzi already camped out on their driveways," the President promised.

By 2016, a fleet of drones will circulate ceaselessly over the 50 states. Each will be equipped with sensitive laser beam measuring systems that can record indoor conversations just from the vibration of window panes.

Speaking on the Business of Sports today at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, basketball legend Magic Johnson endorsed the Administration's plan, "If Barack's new system had been up and running, I wouldn't have had to spend so much cash money on that Stiviano [woman]."

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein has been asked to head an informal commission brainstorming next steps. "The fundamental problem remains the superficiality of our digital capabilities," the husband of UN Ambassador Samantha Power warned. "For at least the next decade, if not longer, the government will only have the technology to monitor thoughts that have been expressed. Yet, it's the unexpressed thoughts lurking deep inside Americans' minds that, ultimately, we most wish to track. Perhaps a massive cadre of paid agents provocateur -- or, as I like to call them, "cognitive infiltrators" -- can be used to seduce and goad citizens into blurting out their innermost buried beliefs?"

Unavailable for comment was President Obama's appointee to run the new surveillance program, Anthony Pellicano. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton enthused, "Bill and I can't think of a better choice for the job. We've known Tony since he helped us out in '92 with that Gennifer Flowers thing."

Obama Administration critics were quick to snipe at the new program for its trillion dollar budget. Congressman Paul Ryan suggested that much of the pressing national need to track down racists could instead be crowdsourced, at zero cost to the taxpayer. Ryan announced he was in discussions with Mark Zuckerberg to add a "Snitch-on-a-Racist" button to all Facebook pages that would allow anyone to anonymously yet publicly denounce anyone else -- living or dead -- for racism, sexism, or homophobia. "It will be disruptive," promised the conservative lawmaker. The Ryan-Zuckerberg initiative was enthusiastically endorsed by the editors of Gawker, TMZ, Jezebel, Deadspin, Slate, and The Atlantic Monthly.

Still, despite some grumblings, the response among national leaders to the President's overall goal was positive. Senator Lindsey Graham said, "It's only fair that all Americans benefit from the data-gathering capabilities of modern intelligence services, such as high-definition night-vision videography, which, to be frank, I didn't even know was a thing before that evening in the park behind the Supreme Court building."

Senator Marco Rubio concluded, "If we don't stop wasting energy on terrorists and start focusing on racists, then the real terrorists will have won."