This was inspired by the documentary CITIZENFOUR about Edward Snowden.  Snowden worked for the National Security Agency and exposed their program of spying on all US citizens, supposedly to protect us from “terrorists.”  Snowden had to flee the country of his birth to avoid persecution for revealing government secrets and was given political asylum in Russia.  The NSA program exposed by Snowden includes the collection of “metadata” of all phone calls, text messages, internet searches, social media posts and other information about citizens.  By “metadata”, they mean the time and date of a phone call or text message, from whom and to whom the call or message was sent, etc., and not the content of the call or message.  The metadata can then be filtered, analyzed and searched to supposedly identify potential “terrorists”, but obviously could also easily be used to identify and persecute opponents of government policies.  Here are the lyrics to my latest draft.

Metadata (We’re Watching You)
by Rob Roper  3rd Draft  Aug 25, 2017

We’re watching you, watching everything you do
We’re watching you, it’s for your own good
We know what you like
We know what you don’t
We know where you go
We know how you vote
We’re watching you

Privacy is dead, freeedom long gone
if you’ve done nothing wrong, then just go along
Don’t you see?
Both parties agree
It’s what we need
to keep us all free
We’re watching you

There once was a man, who ran off with the plan
but you didn’t understand, so now he’s living in a… cold land.
and now he’s fading out
we got the news blacked out
one less boy scout
who stuck his neck out
…for you

Hitler, Hoover, Stalin, in their wildest dreams
could never have imagined, such a beautiful scheme
So hang onto your phone
Take it everywhere you go
’cause that’s how we know
what we need to know
We’re watching you
watching everything you do.

We’re watching you
It’s for your own good

Don’t worry
It’s just…
metadata