The walls have ears, the screen has eyes

I used to be on a lot more social media sites, several years ago, but gave most of them up after my Mom was diagnosed with cancer.

It was then that Facebook started popping up ads for quack cancer cures. They told me I could treat my mother with laetrile. They promised a complete cure.  I didn't fall for it, of course, but it was still upsetting; they were telling me things I wanted to believe.

And the thing is, I had never posted about my mother's health. Apparently someone close to me did, then Mark Zuckerberg connected the dots and pointed me out to the scammers as an easy mark.

That was when I walked away from it all.

I still have my email and my blog, but that's all.   I'm much more careful than I used to be.  I use "Private" mode for most things, to eliminate the cookie trail, and I use the Tor Browser sometimes to mask my information further.

It's not paranoia.  They really are watching me, watching all of us.

That's the world we live in.

Moot

President Obama, on cell phone encryption (via ABC News):

"There has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow…  It’s fetishizing our phones above every other value and that can’t be the right answer.  I suspect the answer is going to come down to how do we create a system that the encryption is as strong as possible, the key is as secure as possible, it is accessible by the smallest number of people possible for a subset of issues that we agree are important."

That's not going to work.

Once that box is opened, every president is going to find a way to pry it open just a little bit wider.  What do you think Dick Cheney would have done with that privilege?  Or Richard Nixon?  How protective of our privacy do you think President "Bring back waterboarding!" Trump would be, and do you honestly think President Hillary would be any different?  She'd be more discreet, certainly, but I have no doubts that she'd be rooting around in our data just as enthusiastically.

It's either open or it's closed; there is no in-between.

Of course, the point is probably already moot.  Have you noticed the NSA has never once said, "Yes, we need a little help cracking phone encryption, too?"

This could well be just about finding legal cover for what they're already doing.

 

1-2-3-4

For a long time the message on my answering machine was “To continue, enter your four-digit access code at the tone.”

I’d come home sometimes to dozens of messages, all of them beep-boop-boop-beep as people tried to guess the code.

There was no code.  My friends all knew they could just leave their message after the beep.