I have been working on a new web site. Well, not me
myself…but a designer who seems to know a whole lot more about the world of
social media and electrons than I ever will. But the process has shown me
that we are in the midst of an ever-increasing dilution of our privacy. And
this worries me.
Beside the fact that I have to keep up with a a trillion
id’s and passwords for accounts that don’t make much sense to me, each of those
accounts wants some vital information about my life. And when taken in total,
it is a real load of information. By aggregate, it is not so much. But lose a
password or have a site cracked and your whole world could start to fall apart.
There was an article in the newspaper the other day about a
woman in Seattle who had her Facebook, Twitter and some other social site
compromised, which led the hackers to her bank account. Talk about Sleepless in
Seattle! That would keep me wide awake. Lucky for her the bank’s security and
fraud division caught the activity before it had gone too far. It seems the hackers were high-schoolers,
tired of their video and computer games and decided to have some fun on the
web. Fun? How does about fifteen years
of hard labor sound like fun, huh kids?
And that is what the DA in King County is trying to get. And I am all
for him getting it, too.
This world in which we live forces us to register and enter all kinds of stuff about ourselves, just to get basic service. And if it can’t be protected, (a la, BankAmerica, Facebook, Chase and Visa) then there is a huge lack of trust on the part of the public. And if that trust continues to be eroded, then suddenly the web’s functionality may be called into question.
Now add on top of this, the President’s signing into law the
emergency power of taking over the Internet by Homeland Security in the case of
“National emergency” and you have the making of a great, big horrific scandal.
It will happen. It will come out that at
some time the law enforcement agencies of this country went in and got
information they should not have using this horrible law. It is one thing to
have teenage hackers or Belarus hackers staking my accounts, but to give
Homeland Security the means to take control of the entire system is a frightening
thing. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would no doubt be shouting from
the highest pinnacle he could find that this is exactly why the first ten
amendments were passed to begin with: to keep the government out of the
business of invading our privacy.
To be sure, they have not crashed the web– not brought it
down– and as far as we know not invaded your information. But this law is only three
days old. Not long as statutes and law go. So this is my warning. It will
happen. They will say it was a mistake. Or they will claim some kind of
national emergency. Not the Obama administration and perhaps not the one which
follows his. But someday soon, there will be a bureaucrat who slips up and
starts a collection process of people making certain acts on the web. It will
get discovered and the department behind the break in liberty and security will
stand up and point to this new law and say, “Says we can. We did. So there.”
Many of you, who read this column every day, know that I am
a supporter of President Obama. But mainly because I so dislike what the Republicans
stand for right now and am so averse to the candidate that they have given us.
Had the GOP not been so far to the extreme right and had their candidate not been
a flip-flop artist, this action by Obama, along with resigning the Patriot Act,
is enough to make me move away from the Democratic ticket.
It is that foul smelling in my political nostrils.
I would have sent this out sooner, but I lost my password. I
hate technology when it becomes such a rotten playground.
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