100504- A joke

.....True story: about 20+ years ago I was watching the US broadcast television premiere of the movie "Godzilla: 1985". No, that's not the joke. It was broadcast TV, so there were paid advertisements. One of the ads was for a device that promised to shield your telephone conversations from electronic surveillance. It came complete with actors playing people who seemed to have serious anxieties about people listening in on their conversations, then expressed appropriately melodramatic relief and confidence once the device was attached to the receiver. I sat there watching that ad and thinking to myself, "Somebody paid money to run that ad. Somebody paid more money than I'm going to earn this year to run that ad. For what? How many people who could conceivably need this product are likely to see that ad? What are the odds that Henry Kissinger was sitting around snarfing cheese doodles and watching "Godzilla: 1985" that night? "He-e-e-ey, dot vould gome in quvite handy, I tink." The whole point of ads like that is that they rely on a certain percentage of the viewers being extremely stupid, or at least too stupid to understand the basics of cost effectiveness analysis. Wiretaps aren't magic. With the technology that existed at the time there would be the cost of the hardware to consider, plus the cost of the installation, plus the cost in man-hours of monitoring any recordings. Now, the only reason someone would fund all of those expenses up front would be if they anticipated that the information culled from the phone conversations would be worth more than the money they invested.

.....All I knew was that if I was holding onto information that valuable, I sure as hell wouldn't be spending my evenings sitting around watching edited Godzilla movies. I'd be watching them uncut and subtitled on VHS.