Edward Snowdon's revelations about the level of surveillance America had been putting not only its own but other country's citizens and politicians under was a shock to pretty much everyone. Pretty much because, well, presumably the whole of the NSA knew, as did all the White House higher-ups who had okayed the surveillance in the first place. There was one person not involved in the day-to-day spying on what people search for on YouTube who somehow managed to guess at the cover tactics, though: satirical cartoon strip writer Dan Perkins, better known as Tom Tomorrow. Perkins' comic This Modern World has been running since the late eighties, skewering political scandals and societal shifts from a Left Wing perspective. In a strip from 1994 that ran in, amongst other places, Spin, he jokes that the NSA and FBI might soon team up to turn the "information superhighway into an Orwellian surveillance system", but why stop there when you could have police search anybody's house they wanted, and imprison people without reason! Oh, how we laughed. And later cried when the Patriot Act passed and it turned out the NSA "jokes" were anything but.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
