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'I'd Tap That' And Other NSA Pickup Lines Are All The Rage

By Elise Hu,
Steve Henn
Published August 26, 2013 at 12:54 PM CDT
An anti-NSA protester in Washington, DC.
Steve Rhodes
/
Flickr
An anti-NSA protester in Washington, DC.

News that National Security Agency officers sometimes abuse domestic intelligence gathering practices to monitor potential love interests has led to a sweeping, satirical response by The People of The Internet. On Tumblr and Twitter, the #NSAPickupLines and #NSALovePoems hashtags have sparked all sorts of creativity from users poking fun at the potential intrusion of the NSA into our personal lives.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, your pin number is 6852," reads a popular "NSA love poem" spreading on the internet right now.

The parody @PRISM_NSA Twitter account, named after the electronic surveillance program leaked by Edward Snowden, has been pickup line central for much of the weekend, so you can keep up with the tweets there. Some of our favorite spy-themed pickup lines and love poems, below:

This was all inspired by the news reported on Friday byThe Wall Street Journal that National Security Agency officers were spying on their exes or love interests, and enough of them were doing it that the practice got its own Orwellian label within the agency: "LOVEINT".

"NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency's authorities" and responds "as appropriate," the agency said in a statement.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Elise Hu
Elise Hu is a host-at-large based at NPR West in Culver City, Calif. Previously, she explored the future with her video series, Future You with Elise Hu, and served as the founding bureau chief and International Correspondent for NPR's Seoul office. She was based in Seoul for nearly four years, responsible for the network's coverage of both Koreas and Japan, and filed from a dozen countries across Asia.
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Steve Henn
Steve Henn is NPR's technology correspondent based in Menlo Park, California, who is currently on assignment with Planet Money. An award winning journalist, he now covers the intersection of technology and modern life - exploring how digital innovations are changing the way we interact with people we love, the institutions we depend on and the world around us. In 2012 he came frighteningly close to crashing one of the first Tesla sedans ever made. He has taken a ride in a self-driving car, and flown a drone around Stanford's campus with a legal expert on privacy and robotics.
See stories by Steve Henn