I often jokingly tell a specific friend that I'll murder him (he says the same to me)... it wouldn't be clear if you read the e-mail correspondences that we're joking. It would be clear if you saw us in real life joking, laughing... but you don't have that context, you don't know the history of my relationship with him, we're both practitioners of an absurdist brand of humour (think adultswim's Tim&Eric humour). Compound all of this with the fact that I'm brown (Asian descendant) and that a running brand of jokes is about terrorism ('yeah so we have AQ training camps in our basement') -- and, I'm sure we're setting off a good amount of triggers.

Here is what is unnerving to me: considering the high-capacity storage capabilities of these three-letter agencies, it's highly likely that a lot of our data has already been copied... it's little use disabling our fb/goog accounts, it's little use deleting everything en masse now.

Anyway, my takeaway from all of this is that 1) I have to stop making these jokes, even in private conversations, and 2) communicate more clearly in my e-mails, so that if it's being read by someone with no context, it does not invoke any suspicions to wrongdoing of any sort. I am extremely annoyed that I have to start doing this, but I will.