Virginia Postrel has an amusing article on someone who inherited Chris Rock's phone number. Go read it, it's a blast. Now, imagine this, celebrities change their phone numbers reasonably often to avoid stalkers or enthusiastic fans so this can happen but it's not a very frequent occurrence.
Terrorists change their phone numbers all the time. And some of them are sloppy about phone security. Imagine it isn't Chris Rock's number you've gotten but somebody more famous at the post office than in the pages of Variety. You start getting calls asking seemingly innocent questions and two weeks later you find yourself pulled in for an FBI interrogation, you're always getting searched at airports, or you have odd reports from your friends and acquaintences that people are asking about you and what interests you have.
All of a sudden it stops being funny, doesn't it.
Posted by TMLutas at March 11, 2004 03:40 PM