I see Arstechnica finally corrected the Egypt/DC area code vingette from their write-up on the WaPo NSA auditing story (now that it’s nearly dropped off their front page so almost no one will see it). Meanwhile National Review built an entire Mark Styne editorial around it:

Idiot Big Brother
The prospect of NSA abuse is now a reality.

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:

A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top-secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).

Seriously.

I enjoy as much as the next chap all those Hollywood conspiracy thrillers about the all-powerful security state — you know the kind of thing, where the guy’s on the lam and he stops at a diner at a windswept one-stoplight hick burg in the middle of nowhere and decides to take the risk of making one 15-second call from the payphone, and as he dials the last digit there’s a click in a basement in Langley, and even as he’s saying hello the black helicopters are already descending on him. It’s heartening to know that, if I ever get taken out at a payphone, it will be because some slapdash timeserving pen-pusher mistyped the code for Malaysia (60) as that of New Hampshire (603).

The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo.

Almost too perfect… yeah, that might be because it didn’t happen.

Maybe they could just have NSA customer-service representatives announcing that your call may be monitored for quality-control purposes at the start of every telephone conversation. Of course, most customer-service representatives are based in India (telephone code 91) but there’s a sporting chance the NSA would confuse it with Kansas (code 913), which could do wonders for the employment rate.

It being National Review you also need to toss in some Benghazi:

It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.

And some “IRS-gate” + “Obamacare”:

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the IRS is continuing to target American citizens according to their political ideology — and that’s before they have your Obamacare records to frolic and gambol in.

But, like Obama says, it’s merely a theoretical “prospect” of abuse. You’d have to be paranoid to think it could actually happen …

Finally, Steyn demonstrates that not only has he not seen the corrected version of the WaPo story, but he also hasn’t read Sen. Feinstein’s response:

What does that leave? Congressional oversight? Senator Dianne Feinstein said that she had not seen the 2012 NSA audit on its 2,776 legal violations until the Washington Post asked her about it. Which means until Edward Snowden brought it to her attention. So she’s just another rubber stamp, too. Most nations that spy on their own citizens manage to make do with one fig leaf of accountability, but in money-no-object Washington there are fig leaves without end.