Did you hear the one about the Human Rights Watch attorney who decided to test the patience of the NSA with a little James Joyce?

The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.

The cantankerous Seymour Hersh was my inspiration. He had told me about the program in a clipped expletive-filled summary in the summer of 2011: “They’re scooping fucking everything, man! Phones, Internet, the whole works.”

I didn’t exactly believe him. He had also told me in 2008 that the Bush administration was close to authorizing airstrikes on Iran. So I treated his new pronouncement as a possibility, a sign from a questionable but often accurate oracle. I had wanted to rebel. The idea of esoteric poetry and prose in the NSA’s vaults appealed to me. “Yes,” I said to myself. “Yes I will.” And so I set out to tell Joyce’s story of a Chapelizod family, in a new way.

I acknowledge now, of course, that the venture was not the wisest idea. Certainly after I was indicted I regretted the hoax. My wife has had her regrets, too. Signing over your house to a law firm is a humbling experience, and for my wife, a clarifying one.

I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal. I admit only that the idea was pretentious.

The story is silly in some ways and troubling in others, but my favorite part comes during a deposition with a special prosecutor from the US Attorney's office:

“So, this text – Finnegans Wake – can you summarize the plot for the record?”

Fearful, I was struck dumb. My attorneys asked for the videotape to be stopped.

“We have to object, Pat – he’s already said in the interviews, the plot itself is a matter of textual interpretation. Each word of the text is open to multiple interpretations. There are potentially an infinite number of plots.”

Update: This story from warscapes.com is fiction. It fooled me.