Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
NSA Proves Parody’s Point
NSA Proves Parody’s Point
Apr 26, 2025 12:52 AM

Here’s one for the you don’t know whether to laugh or cry file: the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security have discovered and quashed an online shop’s attempt to parody the two agencies for behaving like Big Brother.

The silver lining: Dan McCall, owner of the shop, is hoping to restore his his First-Amendment rights through the courts.

The St. Cloud Times reports:

To ridicule electronic surveillance disclosures, he paired the NSA’s official seal on T-shirts for sale with the slogan: “The only part of the government that actually listens.”

He also has one with the sub-heading “Spying On You Since 1952,” and altered the NSA seal to read “Peeping While You’re Sleeping.”

“The NSA and DHS claims there are laws specific to them that prohibit you from doing anything with their logo and we don’t think that jives with First Amendment rights,” McCall said Thursday.

Zazzle, which prints some of McCall’s designs on merchandise, received the letters in 2011. Zazzle informed him of the letters in June and pany said it would no longer carry his items with the NSA seal because they infringed on the NSA’s intellectual property rights. McCall is now selling those items on on CafePress, an online business similar to Zazzle.

According to Public Citizen, the NSA and DHS threatened Zazzle with litigation or criminal prosecution unless McCall’s designs were removed.

The Daily Caller summarized the NSA’s position this way:

NSA’s argument? The products are in violation of the National Security Agency Act of 1959, which includes a broad ban on the use of the words National Security Agency, the letters “NSA,” or “any colorable imitation of such words,” on any product which is “in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency,” without the express permission of the agency itself.

McCall’s lawyer, Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy, responded this way in the Daily Caller story: “English law uses an analogy … of a moron in a rush. I would say even a moron in a rush would not think that these seals as parodied by my client were sponsored by the NSA or the DHS.”

This is all doubly painful for me because my wife has a successful Zazzle shop and has been generally pleased with the privately pany’s management. The sense we’ve gotten is that they’re short-handed from rapid growth and, to minimize risk and oversight demands, have taken a remove-first, ask questions later policy for any plaints. The problem, of course, is that the First Amendment and generations of court precedent affirm the right to parody trademarked material.

The move to censor McCall has people and institutions right and left upset. The Daily Caller is one of several conservative venues shining a light on the story, while the left-leaning Washington Post also has called attention to it in a piece with the biting title “NSA and DHS: the most humorless agencies?”

You can support Dan McCall’s fight for free speech by patronizing what remains of his Zazzle shop here, or by buying one his NSA parody shirts here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved