Spying homes? Baltimore beckons

Posted by Mark Silva at 9:15 am CDT

It didn’t take long for someone to seize upon the commercial opportunities in the National Security Agency’s surveillance of telephone calls.

“NSA records indicate you’re making a lot of calls to Baltimore… Why don’t you just move here?’’ asks a new advertisement in a morning newspaper for Washington-area commuters. The ad pictures President Bush, smiling, and leaning into a telephone in one ear, with his finger stuck in the other ear.

The ad is the product of a nonprofit organization that promotes “Baltimore city living.’’ Placed in the Express, a paper delivered to morning commuters free of charge by The Washington Post, the ad directs readers to the organization’s website, www.livebaltimore.com, which features the same display of the smiling president and mention of the NSA surveillance.

Now, the White House has repeatedly refused to “either confirm or deny’’ the existence of an NSA program collecting the phone-calling records of millions of Americans, which reportedly does not involve actual surveillance of the phone conversations. But Bush has acknowledged the existence of an NSA program monitoring the calls and emails of people inside the United States suspected of communicating with terrorists outside the country.

And Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director who initiated the international terrorist-seeking program in early October 2001 with assurances from the White House that this would be legal, is well on his way to becoming the 20th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The White House has devoted a certain amount of time to combatting attempts to use the president or the office as advertising tools – efforts readily seen in the archival records of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., from his days at the White House, where he and other lawyers kept advertisers honest.

Don't expect the White House to engage with an advertiser invoking a program that the White House won’t even acknowledge. Yet, the White House doesn't take kindly to use of the president as a plug.

"We do not authorize commercial ventures to use the name or likeness of the president in their advertising,'' a spokeswoman says. "The NSA story doesn't change that.''

The White House counsel's office has been alerted about the ad.

The secretive NSA, whose very existence once was classified, makes its headquarters at Fort George G. Meade between Washington and Baltimore.

So any Washingtonian taking the bait of this new Baltimore-promoting ad stands a fairly good chance of passing the NSA – there’s an exit for it on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway labeled “NSA Employees Only’’ – on the way to Baltimore. Innocent cell-phone conversations in the car en route ought to be safe, with the president maintaining that the government is not trolling for information in the private communications of average Americans.

Once there, the website with the NSA-themed ad featuring Bush contains all sorts of ready references for home-buying and rentals in Baltimore.

And, as the telephone voice mail of the organization’s marketing director says, “Thanks, and have a great day in Baltimore.’’