In a press conference on Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced that the National Security Agency would begin focusing its surveillance technology on researching and categorizing individuals whose charismatic qualities could make them threats to the United States and humanity as a whole.
“After seeing the events that have transpired over the election season, it’s become clear that the American public is willing to support anyone who appears to ‘tell it like it is,’ whatever their political views, financial abilities, or personal histories,” Carney said. “Honestly, it’s kind of sickening.”
While the plan has been in development since the announcement of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, the National Security Agency focused all of its assets on the project after it became clear that no Republican candidate would be strong enough to defeat the current presidential nominee. According to Carney, “While it might be too late to stop the possibility of a Trump presidency, the NSA can do everything it can to stop the another disaster of this magnitude from happening again.”
According to Carney, the project, code named “Project Charm Offensive,” will involve the mass listing and categorization of every United States citizen with any degree of influence, power, and personality. Possible candidates for surveillance will include anyone from Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes to middle school class presidents and hosts of iTunes-ranked podcasts. From there, each member will be meticulously researched for factors such as physical attractiveness, speaking voice quality, number of followers on Instagram, and political tendencies. Afterwards, each factor will be rated on a scale of one to ten, with one meaning “benign to harmless” and ten meaning “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Carney elaborated, “To give an example, people with a one rating for political tendencies will include those who actively avoid talking or reading about politics, while those with a ten rating will include people that spam every article on their Facebook newsfeed with a ‘BERNIE 2016’ post. We’re really trying to look out for any and all people who have the capacity to influence politics on a mass scale.”
Though many NSA projects are kept confidential for years, the Charm Offensive will maintain a public database of charismatic people with an up-to-date ratings aggregate system similar to Metacritic known as the Carnegie Index, named after the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. The top 0.1% on the Carnegie Index will be listed on Buzzfeed as a listicle of the name “1,000 People Who Could Charm You Into Joining a Suicide Cult.”
While elected and unelected members of the United States government will not be registered under the Charm Offensive, NSA experts expect most government employees to be “too burnt out by bureaucracy to really try to make any sort of difference.” Carney elaborate further, saying “Never underestimate the power of the American government to grind progress to a halt; it’s what the Founding Fathers wanted.”
