Why the NSA Whistleblower Is Secretly Jason Bourne
As you have probably heard, the NSA has been getting awfully friendly with our digital information -- and at the center of it is this guy:
Coming soon to a CIA torture cell near you!
That's Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA who originally exposed the shady surveillance program and will no doubt be played by Matt Damon in the inevitable movie. Then again, what with the short blond hair and the boring first name coupled with an obvious action movie last name, it's almost as if that's already happened.
Edward Snowden is ... SNOWED IN. In theaters everywhere June 22.
You're probably skeptical -- but comparing the facts, this whole story stinks more than The Bourne Legacy. Sure, Snowden isn't an international shoot-punching machine, but he arguably caused just as much (if not more) intra-agency chaos as Jason Bourne. He just didn't snap anybody's neck while doing it.
For starters, Snowden comes from a mild-mannered background in Nowheresburg, America, just like Jason Bourne. From there, Snowden went on to join the army, just like his Matt Damon doppelganger (Damonganger?).
We can't confirm that Snowden also killed a man with a rolled-up magazine, but we have to assume so.
However, instead of majoring in murder, Snowden kind of went the opposite way by breaking his legs during training and being discharged. Admittedly, this is somewhat less badass. Regardless, like Jason Bourne, Snowden went from the military right into the CIA. The only difference was that Snowden's super-secret spy detail involved a lot more sitting and much less trying to kill people on boats in the middle of the ocean.
However, surprisingly enough, both of those jobs apparently involve the same amount of attractive women on tropical islands.
Being a wanted man has never seemed like such a viable life choice.
That's Lindsay Mills -- Snowden's performance artists girlfriend and self-proclaimed "pole-dancing superhero," which is a comic book we need to read immediately. Mills was living with Snowden in Hawaii while he was working for the NSA and has been waiting there for his return, presumably opening a nice scooter rental shop to pass the time, like Jason Bourne's island squeeze.
This is one of the only scenes from the Bourne series to not feature throat-punches.
Both men had to go on the run after being marked as traitors -- Snowden was virtually disavowed when he exposed a secret government program called PRISM, a name that fits nicely in a filing cabinet next to "Treadstone" and "Blackbriar," which were the names of the two secret operations from the Bourne films.
So, to recap, we have a corn-fed Captain America-lookin' guy who makes it through the army and then goes into a secret government operation with a silly-sounding name. He gets a hot girlfriend and lives in an island paradise before ultimately leaking diabolical information about the government to a brown-haired reporter from The Guardian. Man, except for that meeting with The Guardian, that's pretty much an exact description of the Bourne movies, right?
Oh wait, we almost forgot -- Jason Bourne totally meets up with a reporter from The Guardian in The Bourne Ultimatum. Bourne does some recon to figure out if the guy can be trusted and then sets up an elaborate meeting in a public location -- just like Snowden did when he met with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Snowden learned he could trust the man over any other reporter and staged an elaborate meeting in a hotel, giving Greenwald a series of directions and visual identifier cues so he could single him out from a distance.
The two reporters even look the same.
Chins only slow a journalist down.
Now Snowden has been leading the NSA on an international chase, not afraid to make his voice heard despite being in the very literal crosshairs of the American government. At least until he finally decides to take the fight to them and calls John Boehner to reveal that he's been in Boehner's office the whole time. And then ... some Moby song plays.
