No, I’m not referring to Snoopy the dog of “Peanuts” fame, the creation of the late cartoonist Charles Schultz. The Snoopy I’m talking about are those people and government types who use modern technology to spy on and profit from information, whether aural or visual, that they glean from communications that are supposedly “private.” I feel for those young women who have found out, all too graphically, that their pictures have been hijacked from the Internet but…..
One of my colleagues at Edward P Yorke High School has remarked that few people of my age have embraced computer technology the way I have. Thanks for the compliment, although I would have preferred that the phrase “my age” had been left out, but maybe “my age” has had a lot to do with my perception of what should be so obvious.
You see, I grew up as a civil rights activist in the USA, and those of us who survived those years developed a real understanding about how vulnerable communications could be. All of us expected that our home phones were tapped, along with the pay phones in the immediate area. Spies could plant “bugs” in our bedrooms while we were out, and leave no trace of their surreptitious entry! We knew that we were being photographed and followed, and we developed ways to make it extremely difficult for serious conversations to be monitored.
What I am saying is that the ability to monitor people’s communications has expanded, along with the expansion of technology, and everybody who uses that technology needs to be aware of that! There are people out there who are up to no good, and all of them aren’t so-called government types.
I remember writing in an article over a year ago that I never send any email that I would care about if it wound up on the front page of a newspaper tomorrow! That’s a habit that I developed from years of knowing about “Snoopy” and his trip.
Our young technically savvy people need to take heed. Once you send it from your computer you are vulnerable to anyone who is trolling around for information that they can use to their advantage, whatever they perceive that to be! This includes pictures, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and social security numbers!
Hacker technology is way ahead of those who try to secure computer communications. A friend of mine, who can only be called a technological genius, who writes software programs, told me that the creators of anti-virus software hire people to create viruses and worms. These are then let loose on the Internet. The makers of the anti-virus software are using us as guinea pigs! If their existing programs stop the viruses, they know that their software is successful. If not, they have to make improvements. Those of us who get screwed in the process with crashed hard drives and other problems are of no concern to them!
What has happened to those young ladies is nowhere near the worst that can happen. There is a commercial making the rounds of American cable television stations. It’s an advertisement for a website called “free credit dot com,” and it features a guy with a guitar singing as follows:
“They say a man should dress, for the job he wants,”
“So why am I dressed like a pirate, in this restaurant.”
“It’s all because some hacker stole my identity.”
“Now I’m in here every evening, serving chowder and iced tea!”
“Shouda gone to ‘free credit, free credit dot com.’”
“I coulda seen this coming, like an atom bomb.”
“They monitor your credit, send you email alerts”
“So you won’t wind up selling fish to tourists in T-shirts!”
It’s funny, but it’s not funny! Those who are in business to report people with bad credit are not trying to protect the consumer. They work for businesses and corporations; therefore if someone steals your identity and runs up huge bills in your name and on credit cards fraudulently obtained in your name, you may never clear your credit record, in spite of your innocence and your Herculean efforts to straighten out the mess! It’s just like the infamous “no fly list.” If you have the same name or even a similar name as somebody on that list, just try to book a flight without a major league hassle!
In developed countries right now, even job applications demand that the applicant give their prospective employer the right to run a credit check. Bad credit, no job! I have a friend who was almost fired from a job at a major corporation, a job she had performed with excellent performance reviews for 15 years, not for anything she had done, but because her husband was fighting a tax lien, later proved unjustified, with the US government!
It’s for these reasons that my wife and I have declined the invitations of banks to use online banking, and are extremely cautious about Internet shopping. Bank contracts with consumers severely restrict the circumstances in which banks are liable for unauthorized transactions on your accounts! They have not been enforcing those clauses so far and have been quietly paying off claims because they are concerned that if the number of security breaches that occur was known to the general public, electronic banking would be an impossible sale!
So, please realize that Internet communications are public news unless you and those whom you communicate with use one of the latest forms of encryption to protect your transmissions, and that’s so complex, it’s not worth it for anything other than communications that involve national security at the highest levels.
If racy and sexually explicit pictures are your thing, don’t send them over the ‘Net, unless you want to expose yourself to the world, because that’s exactly what may happen! Protect any communication that has to be protected. Go out to the middle of a park, talk to a person face to face, and hope that the person you’re talking to isn’t wearing a wire!
Here’s just a quick footnote to “somebody.” If “somebody” had read my articles, he would have had no problem understanding whom I supported in the recent general elections. I am willing to talk to anybody, but that doesn’t mean that “somebody” has my support. This is why I hate politics and to a certain extent, I am sorry that I ever messed with this bulls—t, but in a small country like Belize, it’s almost impossible to get away from it! Anyhow, I offered my hand because when the war is done, we still have to coexist together. When he refused it, so be it! It was Kremandala that opened doors for me. Almost everybody else did everything they could to keep those doors closed! “Somebody” has never helped me do anything that I have done in almost 60 years of life.
In fact, I just heard of him yesterday, so “if it be’s that way it be’s that way!” My life after June will be totally consumed by music and writing anyhow, and if the powers that be don’t care to ask for my advice, as Miles wrote, “So What?”