"When she warned us on 2010’s ‘The Message’ that the government was spying on our emails with the help of Google, critics scoffed. But if anyone was going to pull off the tinfoil hat look, it was to be art-school pop icon M.I.A. – and as it turned out, she was right. The song is only a minute long, but “the message” comes over loud and clear as she raps a warning to our digitally connected world: “Handbone connects to the internet, connected to the Google, connected to the government.”
Pitchfork’s reviewer rolled his eyes at the eye, calling it “a simplistic, paranoid rap that's as rhetorically effective as someone in a dorm room ranting about the C.I.A. inventing Aids.” Then, three years later, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had been tapping the servers of Facebook, Google, Amazon and other tech companies that had promised us private and secure communications. M.I.A. should have been vindicated – instead, in typically M.I.A. fashion, she complicated her position by drumming up a friendship with Julian Assange, the Wikileaks boss whose reputation has been tarnished during the years he’s spent hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, avoiding extradition on a rape charge."