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(Huffington Post) Former President Jimmy Carter thinks the National Security Agency is probably monitoring his email. In an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell airing during Sunday's "Meet the Press," Carter said he favors snail mail when communicating with foreign officials.
You can't be too careful nowadays. I got to keep in mind I'm a former US president, a diplomat, and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize as well as the coveted Boy Scouts Silver Buffalo. I'm an author and a humanitarian. The Oval Office is constantly on the phone seeking my advice. Well, not the current Oval Office. Or the one before that. But I'm pretty sure Clinton sought my advice on a number of occasions. Yes, I think I definitely remember that.
So I definitely have to watch my step personal-privacy-wise. For example, when I sent a draft of Christmas in Plains to my publisher, do you think I was going to trust the internet? No offense to Al Gore, but online security has more holes in it than Aunt Gertie's underpants. I have a lot of fans who'd stop at nothing to get a sneak preview of that book. Nothing. Normally, I'd just stick it in an envelope, write on a fake return address, put on a trench-coat and a stick-on mustache, drive to the next county, and drop it in a random mailbox. But this time I didn't want to take any chances. There was an incredibly explicit sex scene in there I didn't want leaking out. So I hid it in a hollow stump and sent my publisher a series of clues until they located it. Some of the clues came in fortune cookies. One was hidden in the New York Times crossword puzzle. Another was tattooed on a Scottie dog. (You had to shave the dog to read it.) In the end, they cut the scene, but as far as I'm concerned the extra precaution was still worth it.
Now I'm about to send Rosalyn's double-chocolate brownie recipe to Shimon Peres. This recipe has been a secret in the family for generations. You think I'm about to let it fall into the hands of the NSA? Carrier pigeons are the obvious choice, but there's no way they'll make it that far. So guess what. Hummingbirds. That's right. Those little suckers travel thousands of miles. That's the sort of thing you learn as an eagle scout, and just an example of the kind of information you don't want falling into the wrong hands. So I just have to train them to fly to Israel instead of Chile and strap just one piece of the recipe to each bird. For example, "5 cups sugar" or "350 degrees." (These snippets are not the actual amounts, just examples. I'm not that big a chump.) I figure to get the whole recipe over there, it'll take me between 450 and 500 birds.
But you can't be too careful these days.
