No Call Left Behind

With a long, sweeping bow to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, I changed the title of this entry from "Private Parts" based on her column of June 16. She mentions "that polls indicate that the overwhelming American attitude is 'Spy on me.'"  Please.

As I was saying,  “law enforcement” can be divided into at least two parts: Criminal Investigation and Crime Prevention.  One is after the act; one is before the act.  Big difference.

Anyone who has watched any of the cops and robbers TV shows knows that all kinds of information is “out there.” “Out there” may mean on servers scattered around the world.  Or “right there” on your smartphone.  It remains for detectives to connect the dots and find the perp.  A crime is committed. A suspect is ferreted out.  A cellular phone is found.  After obtaining a warrant the calls are “dumped,” as they say.  All of the data about the suspect’s movements are merged.  And the person is cleared or becomes a suspect.

How about crime prevention? That is the question. How much of our lives are we willing to have “examinable” in order to stop the bad-guys in their tracks?  Is there really a need to wade through all of that data for every person in order to find a kernel of significance?

No.  It would be a waste of time.  What we do need to see is what we used to call “exception reports” when I worked in the long-distance phone business.  At one company that I worked for we offered customers the opportunity to see things that were exceptional: Calls longer than n minutes; calls during specific times; calls to certain states, cities or area codes.  Combine them and management can spot problems.  Does an employee have a family problem that needs attention?  Is someone looking for another job?

What if intelligence analysts could do the same with much of the data that is “out there”?  Enter the somewhat futuristic TV show “Person of Interest,” the premise of which is that a computer has been built that analyzes every possible piece of data and comes up with the names of two people, one of whom is going to do harm to the other.  (It’s an interesting trick that they play on us when the tables are turned.)

The point is well taken: It is really hard to stay “off the grid.”  There’s little doubt that clues exist before the fact that a bad thing is going to happen and who is going to do it:

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols left plenty of clues that were used to convict them after the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City.  Could those clues have been used to catch the plot before it was hatched?  There were dots to be connected.

The 19 people who carried out the 9/11 attacks lived among us for months, leaving trails a mile wide that were pieced together after the destruction.  People in positions to know, with their hair on fire, wrote memos starting in January, 2001,  that warned of the attacks.  There were, after all, dots to be connected.

The brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were known to authorities well before they burst on the scene as the Boston Marathon Bombers.  There’s probably plenty of evidence to convict the lone surviving brother.  But could connecting the dots have prevented this massacre?

As quoted in The New York Times recently, Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state.   It’s a surveillance state in the hands of corporations. 

One question is does that mean that one gives up all sense of privacy be being “on the grid”? 

Another is whether that corporate and public data should be accessible to the government?

To the first question, in a sense, Yes.  In a sense. Even if you’re talking strictly about the electric grid, one’s usage could be significant. 

Example: If your electric bill is “substantially” higher –whatever that means—than you neighbors’ perhaps there’s something going on.

And what if your water bill is “substantially” higher –again, whatever that means – than your neighbors’ perhaps there’s something going on.

Are we a police state if some agency looks at those dots, checks your bank and ATM usage, and goes before a judge to obtain a search warrant to see if you’ve got a meth lab in your garage?

 Eric Schmidt of Google said in 2009 “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”  I DISAGREE IN PRINCIPLE.  There could be lots that I do that I don’t want anyone to know about.    It’s when what I’m doing is illegal that the authorities need to know about it.

For more on the structure of our intelligence apparatus see this column by Tim Shorrock: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/opinion/put-the-spies-back-under-one-roof.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130618&_r=1&

 Some say that you can have privacy or you can have the Internet, but you can’t have both.

It is at least possible to participate in online culture while limiting horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure.  But it is practically impossible to protect your privacy vertically –from the service providers and social media networks and now security agencies that have access to your every click and text and email.

In the olden days, when faxes were just becoming widespread, there was talk of making it impossible to re-fax a fax or of notifying the sender of an initial fax that it has been copied or re-faxed.  That never went anywhere.  But how about emails with these features:

1.              Sender notification when an email is received, and opened.

2.              Making something that you send un-forwardable.

3.              Having emails deleted from the server and the recipient’s computers in some time.

The Internet has changed everything. I could stop right there.  You know me better than that.  There is, however a divide between information about ourselves that we readily divulge and information about us that we have no idea is out there.

People are posting running commentaries on where they are, what they are drinking and with whom. It’s amazing.  But it’s all voluntary.  Even bragging.

Let’s take a look at the other stuff, and then try to figure out what, if anything, to do about it.

To begin with, most people have no idea how much information is contained in their computer hardware.

Some examples:

Computers all over the world know the house that I live in, and the car that was parked in my driveway when Google’s camera-car drove by.

Computers know when I make a cellular phone call, to whom, for how long and what towers it was relayed through.  Ditto emails and text.

Computers know what products and services that I search for online.  On the bottom of my screen I’m even told that “people who bought that also bought this.” Should I be surprised that when I am on FaceBook there are ads on the right side of my page that show the results of my recent searches. 

How do they know that?

Each computer has two identifying numbers: One is an Internet Protocol (IP) address; one is a Media Access Control (MAC) address.

Some specifics:

A few years ago I was dumb and fell for one of those scams that resulted in my Hotmail account being hijacked.  It took a while but I was able to demonstrate to Hotmail that I was who I said that I was even though I didn’t match the recently-changed identifiers of mother’s maiden name, etc.  How?  For years I’d been accessing my emails from one laptop, now it was being accessed from another.  And I was sitting at the older one while the hijacker was sitting at a newer one. I regained control of my email account.

I was in Europe recently.  I did some online searches for where to eat, places to visit and travel directions.  All in Munich, with answers in German.  I even read The NY Times in Munich –albeit in English.

Back in the US of A my new searches stopped having German-oriented results and being written in German.

Have you ever accessed a discount-air-travel website to check out pricing, surfed away, and then returned –only to find out that the price had gone up? Their server recognized your computer. That’s their way of teaching you to “buy now” next time.

Here’s an experiment.  You and a friend check pricing from two different computers –one a Windows device and one a Mac.  Many items that you shop for will show different prices.  Typically, Mac users will be shown higher prices.  Go figure.

Since you are reading this blog let me tell you a few things about people who come to this site.  Anytime I want to I can check my account and find out the following:

• How many people visited the blog today?
• What countries did they log in from?
• What were the operating systems of their computers (Windows, Mac, other)?
• What browsers did they use (Explorer, Safari, FireFox, other)?
• Last but not least, what site were they on before coming to this blog?

And that’s for free.  Imagine what information someone could buy?

You may have heard the term “megadata,” referring to the bare bones of computer data.  In digital cameras megadata includes the make and model of the camera, the date and time the pix was taken, and the location.  Privacy?  Forget-about-it.

I recently uploaded pix on FaceBook that I had taken at an event, using my iPhone.  Later I uploaded pix that I had taken with my Panasonic and uploaded to my iMac  and then sent to FaceBook.  There they are, in two separate albums, identified as being taken using IOS (the iPhone) and Aperture (an improved iPhoto on my iMac).  Privacy?

There are so many facts about us that are collected on a daily basis: Credit card payments for fuel and food; MetroCards on subways and highway toll-booths; online and in-store purchases; bank deposits and withdrawals; online searches on Google, Bing and others.

When you stop to think about it, there’s an absolutely amazing amount of data out there about each of us.  It used to be a segmented, incomplete paper trail. 

Now it’s an all-encompassing trove of precise, track-able data. 

The question is, should we allow our government to know that much about us?   
To further complicate matters, I just returned from seeing "War On Whistleblowers" at a showing by MoveOn.org at the Burton Barr Library in Phoenix.  It's an interesting and informative movie --a "must see."  Some viewers tried to tie it to Edward Snowden, formerly of NSA.  I'm not sure that he's a whistleblower, because, a) he was complicit in what is going on, and, b) what was going on is exactly as Congress established and the President signed.  I'm not sure that he's a spy, either, although that's what he's being charged with.    To coin a phrase, "It's complicated." 
 

What's your take on this subject?

Don't Tell Me "I don't care"!

I realize that you don't care about alot of things. And here it comes, like the man downing six double-cheeseburgers who wears size triple-extra-large sweat pants that are too tight: There's a big "but" in there.

But the fact of the matter is that a very large percentage of the people on the planet DO care.

Some care because it is THEIR ox that is being gored.
Some care even though it's NOT their ox that is being gored.

You may not want to care. Even if you don't CARE, it actually does MATTER to you. Then it's just a short hop from MATTER to EFFECT you.

It mattered to you when Imperial Japan bombed the harbor on some remote Pacific Island on 12/7/41.
It mattered to you during their rape of Nanking.
It mattered to you when Nazi Germany bombed London night after night.
It mattered to you when concentration camp furnaces belched out the smoke from millions of burning bodies.
It mattered to you when ethnic cleansing began once-again in the remains of Yugoslavia.
It mattered to you when, with Bin Laden's help, the Taliban in Afghanistan, was spreading their vile version of fundamentalism.

Other things that actually do matter to you, and effect you whether or not you want to care about them are:
-That our petro-dollars go to bolster feudalism, unemployment, suppression, violence, illiteracy and, yes, religious fundamentalism. We are in essence funding both sides of our wars in the Middle East.
-That our "every-day low prices"” in big-box stores comes at the expense of sweat-shop labor in China and much of the third world. And while they "like" it, they don't "“appreciate" it.
-That my freedom to speak or to write is curtailed. Because you are next.
-That we are polluting the air that surrounds and protects our own planet, sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Whether measured in decades or centuries, alot more of the world will be under water than it is today.
-That we've built-up the most dangerously-high deficit in the the country's history by granting tax breaks to people who don'’t need them.

You may not want to believe that John Donne was right when he said in 1624 that "All mankind is of one author.... No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Or whether you believe that Hillel was right when, at about the time that Jesus preached in Jerusalem, he wrote this:

"If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?"

Specifically addressing your "I don't care" diatribe, it was not "“Islamic people" who attacked us on 9/11. It was fanatical adherents of an off-beat fundamentalist sect of Islam, that is reputiated by most "Islamic people"” (We, too, have our very own, home-grown, off-beat fundamentalist sects and terrorists --see Jonestown; see Oklahoma City.)

And in the view of those who attacked us --and their view DOES count-- they didn't "start" it. Their primary gripe is our very presence in their region. To them, our support of oppressive kingdoms is what matters to them. No serious person believes that anyone is trying to create a Caliphate U.S.A. They want us, and our influence, out of their region.

So the two questions are:
-How do we disengage ourselves from that part of the world without being totally isolationists?
-How much do we care what they do within their region to their own people?

Now, for those readers who have not seen the original "I don'’t care" that is making its way around the Internet --albeit incorrectly attributed to a lady in Atlanta-- here it is.

I DON'T CARE


WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS?

"Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001? Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania? Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning or crushing death that day, or didn't they?

And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't. I don't care at all.

I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

I'll care when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling, slashed throat.

I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college hazing incident, rest assured that I don't care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I don't care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and  fed "special" food that is paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.

And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and ---- you guessed it, I could not have said this any better myself!

That's a fact! I don't care. Wish I could but I won't until a lot attitudes from the radical Muslim terrorist changes. That's not likely, considering their past tyrannical, conquering and inhumane behavior [believe like us, or die] over the last 1400 years.

If you agree with this view point, pass this on to all your e-mail friends. Sooner or later, it'll get to the people responsible for this ridiculous behavior! If you don't agree, then by all means hit the delete button. Should you choose the latter, then please don't complain when more atrocities committed by radical Muslims happen here in our great country.