Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic is set in a primitive/prehistoric era. A caveman-like figure sends a message: "Child born! Must send signal to home village!" He uses a drum or signal to communicate. Another person hiding in the bushes intercepts the communication, saying "What the..." The sender catches the spy and yells, "Hey! You spying on my communications!" The spy responds, "Is for your own good!" The sender protests, "Possible actually lion!" (i.e., there might actually be a lion nearby, justifying surveillance). The spy counters with "Lions everywhere" -- implying that the threat of lions is used to justify mass surveillance of all communications.

The Humor

This is a satire of modern government mass surveillance programs (such as the NSA's PRISM program revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013) transposed into a prehistoric setting. The "lions" stand in for "terrorists" or other security threats that governments cite to justify monitoring private communications. The comic highlights the absurdity of the surveillance-state logic: the spy claims the interception is "for your own good," and when challenged, invokes an omnipresent threat ("lions everywhere") to justify blanket spying. By setting this in prehistoric times, the comic suggests that the tension between privacy and security is as old as communication itself, and that the justifications for surveillance have always been somewhat flimsy. The primitive setting also makes the surveillance apparatus look obviously ridiculous, which is the point -- it should look just as ridiculous in the modern context.

References

• The comic alludes to the NSA surveillance revelations of 2013, when Edward Snowden disclosed that the U.S. government was conducting mass surveillance of citizens' communications.
• The argument "lions everywhere" parodies the justification that pervasive threats require pervasive surveillance, a common talking point in debates over government surveillance powers.