Thursday, June 13, 2013

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CANNOT HIDE


Do y’all remember Sarah on the Andy Griffith show? She was Mayberry’s phone operator and was able to listen in on everyone so became the go-to source for all gossip. If a terrorist ever called someone in Mayberry, Sarah would be the first to know. That was over 50 years ago. I wonder if people back then eschewed the telephone over privacy concerns? I recently received a call from an older client who never had a computer and had rarely even seen a website until a month or so ago. He got around to Googling himself (as we all do eventually) and was shocked to find that “The Internet” knows all about him. He asked if there was a way to "block all that." I welcomed him to the 21st century and said "Nope."


The news media has successfully hyped “metadata” as the latest earth-shattering controversy. Bull hockey! The government, AT&T, Verizon, Amazon, Google, Facebook and anything else connected to, well, anything has been collecting metadata on us for a long time. I recently read an article about the NSA from 2006 that is almost the exact same headlines we are seeing now. It wasn’t big news during the Bush years. It is in the Obama years. I don’t get that.
Metadata is defined as “data about other data.” For example, a digital image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, location data and so on. Email metadata would include the sender and recipient name, the number of characters in the message body and so on. Phone metadata would include the caller, receiver and phone numbers of everyone involved.


Barney prepares for a terrorist assault on Mayberry
Every single bit of this information is stored somewhere. It has to be, otherwise none of it would work. Somehow, we Americans expect our government to go after evil people but also turn a blind eye to metadata that is just sitting there in plain sight. Yeah, yeah, I get the whole “Big Brother” concept. But I do not--cannot--buy into the conspiracy that the government is “spying” on each and every one of us.

If I decided tomorrow to build a dirty bomb (I could, you know. I'm smart like that) then, by golly, you citizens have a right to know about it. I guarantee you that some alarm at the NSA just went off when I typed that. Since the alarm sounded, NSA computers have likely compiled my metadata from Facebook, Twitter, Verizon and Google, connected all the dots and assessed my threat to humanity. If I turn up missing the next couple of days, y’all will know that I am stupid like that, too.
Every modern citizen on this planet is profoundly interconnected to each other. Privacy is an old fashioned notion now. Yes, that is uncomfortable but it is the truth. If you don't want to live in such a society, you’ll need to get off the grid and live off the land. Even then, I can find you on Google Earth.
Every modern citizen on this planet is profoundly interconnected to each other. Privacy is an old fashioned notion now. Yes, that is uncomfortable but it is the truth. If you don't want to live in such a society, you’ll need to get off the grid and live off the land. Even then, I can find you on Google Earth.
(As a bonus to my blog readers, Here is an interesting article on how the British Crown could have tracked down the "Rebels" during the American Revolution using the same kinds of metadata available to the government now)

(As a bonus to my blog readers, Here is an interesting article on how the British Crown could have tracked down the "Rebels" during the American Revolution using the same kinds of metadata available to the government now)



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