Pop Culture Gets the NSA Wrong Again

The latest episode of Burn Notice repeats a government-conspiracy meme about the NSA that seems to have emerged in Enemy of the State and become embedded in Hollywood's conception of government covert operations (not that Hollywood has a real grasp on anything internationally-related beyond the superficial, Syriana included).

The NSA officially has supplanted the CIA as the official spooky agency in American pop culture, much like the Department of Homeland Security has supplanted FEMA as the source of traitorous governmental conspiracies against the U.S. government.

The meme I'm speaking of is the conception of the NSA as a spy agency like the CIA, but on steroids. The NSA is a an intelligence gathering organization. They monitor electronic signals around the world from emails to cell-phone calls to landline calls. They do not run assassination squads, train covert agents or anything of the sort. That is what the CIA and possibly parts of the military/Department of Defense do.

This meme seems to have emerged in the early 1990s because it was then that the U.S. government officially acknowledged the agency's existence. Until that time, its entire existence was classified.

By repeating this meme, Burn Notice is contributing to the misinformation/miseducation of the American people regarding what our government really does. It also perpetuates the meme, making it even more likely to survive, and contributing to the general public's misunderstanding of which parts of the government do what.