Ted Baumann
Yesterday I fell for an April Fools’ joke for the first time (that I can remember, at least).
A blog post, ostensibly from Georgia Tech, announced a new program to award credit to students who use their smartphones while logged on to the campus Wi-Fi system. “Every website visit, post, tweet, photo, and yes, even yaks are available and tied to a user,” it said. “Grades are assigned using machine learning that has been trained to recognize intellectually valid content. The student receives a monthly report of their progress. The more they use the Internet, the faster they graduate.”
At first I thought, “So much for digital privacy on campus.” When I realized I’d been had, I chuckled, seeing my bamboozlement as a by-product of age.
But I soon realized that my gullibility wasn’t funny at all. Instead, it’s grim proof that nothing about our digital world, no matter how outrageous, seems unusual anymore. Every day reveals a new abuse of digital privacy, each more insane than the last.
In fact, one of the biggest privacy outrages in a long while is about to pass through our supposedly “hopelessly divided” Congress….
Ted Baumann
Last summer my band played a Fourth of July gig at an outdoor festival in a well-heeled suburb of Atlanta. The lawn in front of us was filled with parents on picnic blankets and little kids running to and fro. The street was filled with noisy but well-behaved revelers, enjoying the rare legal opportunity to drink locally-brewed beer in public. Fireworks filled the dusk sky.
Everyone was happy.
Everyone that is, except for the company-sized contingent of heavily-armed black-clad militarized police, complete with an armored assault vehicle and automatic weapons, which surrounded the event. Especially the guy who threatened me with arrest for backing my car up to the stage without awaiting orders.
This, I realized grimly, isn’t my granddad’s America anymore…
Ted Baumann
Sometimes I wonder just how bad the news about government spying can get. The answer was in my inbox this morning. I quickly ran out of superlatives: Awful. Terrible. Appalling. Dreadful.
The article in question reported that for most of the last two decades, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been deliberately infecting the “firmware” that runs most common hard drives, including those made by Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Toshiba, Samsung and Maxtor.
There’s a 99% chance that the computer you’re using has one of those in it. Mine has four.
The malware campaign, called “Equation,” has infected tens of thousands of public and private computers in more than 30 countries. And it allows the NSA to read everything on those machines at will.
Unless you’ve done one simple thing to thwart them…
Ted Baumann
In the summer of 1849, Austrian Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky did something no one had done before: He bombed a city from the air.
His target was Venice, then in rebellion against the Habsburg crown. During the siege, he launched a fleet of unmanned linen balloons, carrying bombs made from canister shot and gunpowder, timed to drop over the besieged city.
Radetzky told Emperor Franz Joseph that the effect on the people of Venice was “frightful.” Indeed, Radetzky’s balloons had done little physical damage, but had a substantial effect on the morale of the city’s defenders. As the 19th century wore on, fear of attack by airships became a constant theme in popular literature. By World War I, the mere mention of the word “Zeppelin” was enough to cause panic in the streets of London.
A prevailing theme in the literature of the era and the minds of the people was that these aerial monsters would always be deployed by one’s enemies. So it says a lot about the current atmosphere in the U.S. that the overwhelming public reaction to the deployment of massive Army blimps over Interstate 95 in Maryland has been fear and rejection….
Ted Baumann
I often ask myself: “Is America becoming a Third World country?” I’ve traveled all over the world and seen the ins and outs of developed and undeveloped nations, observing economic and political structures that work and many that don’t. And what I too often see in the Third World — it’s that fair and equal treatment under the law often goes amiss.
And it’s what’s lying beneath the surface in American politics — the nefarious deals made between corporations and the politicians that are supposed to keep them in check — that makes me think the Third World is where we’re headed as a nation.
In my global travels, I often find myself in a hotel room, bar or restaurant with only a local newspaper for company — at least in those places where I speak the language. A scan of the headlines gives me a pretty good indication of the state of local politics and business.
One of my personal indicators of the local environment is the nature and frequency of articles describing government investigations into businesses. It’s a great way to see who is aligned with whom, and who isn’t.
Ted Baumann
On my desk I have a teargas canister that a policeman fired at me many years ago. It’s there to remind me of several things: that the struggle for liberty is often violent; that 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile (a.k.a. pepper spray) really hurts; and that somebody, somewhere, makes a lot of money selling the tools of repression to government.
A policeman in Cape Town fired that particular canister. But it wasn’t made in South Africa. Combined Tactical Systems, based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania manufactured it. CTS’ 37mm M1A2 teargas rounds were exported to South Africa throughout the 1980s from their factory on banks of the Shenango River.
Since then, CTS and other U.S. manufacturers have continued to make cash hand over fist by meeting the “crowd control” needs of such bastions of democracy as Egypt, Yemen and Sierra Leone … as well as the police force of Ferguson, Missouri.
