Loss of Privacy

Let me start by saying, I hate this show.  I don’t try to hide my hatred, nor my bias.  If I were not married, I would never even look at it, but, with marriage comes compromise and each week I am subjected to one of the worst television shows that I’ve ever seen.  That said, I recently watched the episode titled Broken Home and learned some interesting things that CSI: Miami is teaching people.

Rich people, who live in big houses, have lots of secrets to hide and Horatio will find them all
Horatio’s team finds out that the babysitter’s mother was sleeping with her boyfriend and that the babysitter and her boyfriend killed her parents.  He also learns that the 12 year old Montavo boy is a thief and the neighbor, who is a doctor, is a serial killer.  Yes, Horatio will expose all of you and he will always catch you.  As Frank, the cop, says, “that’s the thing about these neighborhoods…big houses, big secrets.”  The moral here?  Don’t be rich and you won’t have all these secrets and problems to hide.

After being shot in the head, you only need a few weeks to get back to work
Delko recently got shot in the head.  He must be some kind of guy to be completely recovered in three weeks.  He had memory loss but is somehow cleared to work in such a short time.  Surely, he must be some kind of superman.  Of course, he makes a mistake and says he came back too soon but I’m sure he’ll be back next episode, magically recovered.  Sure enough, he’s back next week, forgetting how to use equipment, but still on the job.

If you are in trouble, you should rat someone else out to make it easier for yourself
We have taught our young people well with television indoctrination.  The Montavo boy, who at the tender age of 12, has learned that, if you rat out other people, then that helps your case.  When Horatio discovers that the young boy has been stealing from his neighbors, his first reaction is to say that his babysitter was doing something bad as well.  Too bad he hasn’t had logic class yet.  He believes, and Horatio tells him, that, by ratting out someone else, he does indeed help himself.

If you’re a minor and your parents are suspects in a murder, you don’t get an attorney
Horatio questions the 12 year old boy without the presence of his parents or a court-appointed attorney.    This is okay because the boy is really guilty of theft and we can skirt a few laws if it means getting our man, even if the man is a boy.

If a law enforcement officer asks often enough, then you should do what they ask
In this episode, Ryan repeatedly asks the girl for her cell phone.  She eventually gives it up without a fight or a search warrant.

If you flee from the police, you are guilty
While in this case it was true, this is not necessarily true in all cases.  On CSI: Miami, however, every single person who runs is guilty of something.

If you aren’t hiding anything you should just give up your DNA
The boy’s father is suspected of killing the babysitter’s father.  They want to swab his cheek and get some DNA to see if he really did it.  Natalia and Ryan present their case to him in a way that says, “if you’ve got nothing to hide, then give it up.”  This tactic is used quite often on CSI: Miami.  Every now and then, a bad guy will say “not without a warrant.”  Of course, the bad guys who say this are usually the biggest jackasses going, leading ordinary viewers to the impression that only jerks do this sort of thing.

Horatio does a good deed
Often, Horatio does a good deed to make people more sympathetic to law enforcement.  In this case, Dr. Mike Lasker is a serial killer who stole a bracelet from one of his victims.  Not only does he figure out that Dr. Lasker is a serial killer, he makes the daughter of the victim happy by returning her property to her.  Horatio always seems to find people who have been wronged and help them.  This way, you can end the episode with a warm, fuzzy feeling that the bad guys are in jail and law enforcement loves us.

Considering CSI: Miami is one of the most watched shows on the planet, it is scary how they consistently skirt the law, screw around with people’s rights, and neglect to let the viewer know that what they are doing isn’t quite kosher.  This is only one episode.  Imagine what you can learn over the course of 20-25 episodes in a season.  Really, I want to kill my husband for making me watch this crap week in and week out but, I’d bet all the tea in China that Horatio would rush on up to New York (or send those CSI: NY guys) and catch my ass.

The Giant of Cerne Abbas is located in Dorset England.  This photo was taken by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a photographer who takes photos from the air.  He has created a traveling exhibition called, Earth From The Air, which displays many of his photos.

From Wikipedia:

The Cerne Abbas giant is a hill figure of a giant naked man on a hillside near the village of Cerne Abbas to the north of Dorchester in Dorset, England. The 180 feet (55 metres) high, 167 feet (51 metres) wide figure is carved into the side of a steep hill and is best viewed from the opposite side of the valley or from the air. The carving is formed by a trench 1 foot (0.3 metre) wide and about the same depth which has been cut through the grass and earth into the underlying chalk. In his right hand the giant holds an enormous knobbed club 120 feet (36.5 metres) long.

According to Cnet, implanting people with RFID chips isn’t as lucrative, or popular, as we are led to believe.  Ever since VeriChip went public with their idea to implant humans, their stock has been struggling.  The chip, to be used for medical purposes, has attracted a mere 222 humans willing to be chipped.

Three years ago, VeriChip began its ad campaign about how wonderful and useful it would be to be chipped.  Everyone from civil libertarians to my grandma balked at the idea, claiming that there were severe privacy issues at stake in such an endeavor.
Cnet also points out that

Virtually all the company’s revenues come from two Canadian companies it acquired in 2005. These companies, EXI Wireless and Instantel, specialize in infant tracking and “wander” detection systems in rest homes. In these systems, RFID tags alert nurses and medical professionals if an infant or other patient is passing through the exits or into unauthorized areas. In these systems, however, the RFID chip is contained in a wristband.

VeriChip, however, has stated that they intend to continue to market their RFID chips because it’s a good idea for medical patients to always have their records with them.  While these chips are a good idea for tracking things such as a lost pet or merchandise, it’s not a good idea to tag every single human just because it’s a convenience.  In theory, tagging grandpa in the old folks’ home to keep track of where he’s wandered off to, again, is a good idea.  However, you already pay thousands of dollars to have actual, live humans do this job.  And they’ve been doing this job for decades.  Has there suddenly been a huge increase of old folks running off the reservation?

Using the VeriChip for other medical reasons might also seem reasonable if you have severe allergies or you have some sort of special needs.  However, it is not reasonable to use my tax dollars to force hospitals across the USA to redo their emergency rooms solely because you can’t be bothered to get a bracelet and an ID card listing your medical condition.  It is your responsibility to take care of your health matters and not place the burden on someone else.

One Problem not addressed in implantable RFID chips are what to do when you need an MRI.  It is known that the skin around the tag will burn when subjected to devices like an MRI.  You could solve this by implanting the RFID tag in a finger, but that just makes it easier for a thief to take that finger with them when they rob you.  If you want to prevent identity theft, then you have to introduce two factor identification, which negates the benefits of having a chip at all because third parties would be introduced, making the entire system less secure than advertised.

Larger problems deal with the end of life issues of a chip.  Technologies change and, in ten years, the chip will not work with the latest technologies.  This would force a person to get a new chip.  If standards are not imposed, you will need different chips for different things.  It makes much more sense to create human RFID tags to be placed in something the person wears every day, such as a wedding ring or a bracelet.  Upgrades will create nightmares, literally, for people once the chip becomes obsolete and a person must return to have the chip removed and replaced.

It’s also no surprise that no one wants this from VeriChip.  We are already uniquely identifiable by a dozen or so different processes.  We have retina scans, fingerprints, DNA and voice recognition.  Then, there are the “minor” unique characteristics such as race, hair color, eye color, height, weight, and shoe size.  The only thing an RFID chip can do is put this into one place, making it easier than ever to track every single thing you do in life.

The slippery slope in this argument is that we’ve already tracked cargo, then pets and cattle.  Next, we will track immigrants.  Who do you think is the last stop?  That’s right.  It’s you.  The government is going to shove a leash up your ass and you’ll like it.  Within a short period of time, you’ll not even notice it’s there.

These chips can and will be abused to determine what you are doing.  You think it’s bad now, with Presidents getting FBI files on their political enemies?  Hitachi now has a chip so small that you can literally dust an area with them and connect the dots later.  Imagine what can be done when there are no longer any paper trails to expose illegal activity.  RFID will be used to see exactly who you voted for, what dissident group you belong to, and who you co-mingle with that also does not like the current governmental regime.

There is no way to justify implanting legal, foreign nationals who have chosen to live here.   In order to do it, you would have to chip every American citizen as well.  Then, you would be faced with the prospect of what you are going to do with the illegal citizens who have no chips?  They will stick out in a field of chipped Americans and the government will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration.  Worse yet, would be the tit-for-tat retaliation that other countries will enforce against the United States.

I am a, mostly, law abiding citizen.  I do not take kindly to people telling me what I can and cannot do.  I do not like people tracking my whereabouts.  When I leave my home, no one knows where I am except “out” and I’d like to keep it that way.  There is not a soul on this planet that needs to know where I am every moment of every day.  I wear a medic alert bracelet should something terrible happen to me while I’m out.  If wearing a bracelet versus being implanted means that those two seconds are the difference between life and death for me, then I chose death.  I will not be tracked and I will not allow others to decide that I need to be tracked.  Keep your RFID tags and chips and use them to track Fluffy or your cargo.  Do not come near me with them.

Our privacy is slowly disappearing.  Some care.  Most do not.  I suspect that, by the time I am an old lady, rocking in my chair on the front porch each afternoon, that I, and a few like me, will remember a time when privacy mattered.  I will witness the erosion of privacy and individual rights as the generations behind me freely give up what the generations before me fought so hard to preserve.

I’m so sick and tired of celebrity headlines dominating the news.  The news used to actually report newsworthy items and not concern themselves with catering to the lowest common denominator.  That task was left to the general entertainment of television shows and made for TV movies.

In the past six to ten years, there has been a massive shift to catering to garbage.  This is most likely due to the news organizations realizing that people like stupid humor and train wreck celebrities so, they started ignoring real news and went to what brought instant ratings and huge advertising dollars.

I’m not going to disparage people like Britney Spears, nor am I going to make fun of the circus of Anna Nicole Smith.  Britney Spears is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is completely out of control, and has no idea how to function in the real world.  Instead of focusing on that and how to help her and other people, the news just makes fun of her.  Her “friends” do nothing to actually help her and, in fact, are encouraging her behavior because it makes for a good sound bite.

Anna Nicole Smith led a semi-tragic life.  The Economist wrote a very good obituary about her life.  Instead of having some dignity in her death, we are bombarded daily with a circus that includes, a joke of a judge, people fighting over her body, people fighting over her DNA, and people fighting over her daughter.  Even in death, she hasn’t quite achieved that celebrity status that she so yearned for while she was alive.

So, what’s the point of all this?  Why bother if I don’t care one bit about it?  I agree that you should report the death of a semi-celebrity, but move on.  There are far more important, and tragic, things happening in the world.  Stop reporting and giving attention to low quality news that, quite frankly, are not what we, as a society, should be concerning ourselves with.

The media, however, is complicit in this as well.  Take, for example, the NBA all-star game.  The media are reporting it as a huge success and great fun.  The major media that covered the event are mostly ignoring the hundreds of arrests and the general thuggery that the league has turned into.  The NBA chooses to claim that the all-star game was a success and everything is great because they are all too happy to take the money and run.  Their pathetic attempts to reform the league by making players wear suits have done nothing to improve their image.  They have, apparently, decided that it’s best to just ignore the problems and write that the NBA is great and everyone is happy.

Most of the “war on terror” has been ignored or spun so badly that no one cares.  Americans are more interested in who Simon Cowell is going to make fun of on American Idol than what’s going on in Afghanistan.  Hell, most of them probably can’t even find Afghanistan on a map.

This is partly because this is what is marketed to Americans and partly due to the deterioration of critical thinking skills in the education system.  We are now starting on a second generation of people who cannot think for themselves.  They are fed a steady diet of toilet humor, contests to make instant riches and propaganda that puts a current political position in a favorable light.

People like me are in the minority.  If we begin shouting, we are quickly silenced by the drones who can shout louder.  Majority rules.  No one wants to hear about how horrible things really are in Iraq.  No one wants to learn about other countries because, well, it’s too hard.  No one wants to believe that America is no longer the greatest nation on Earth, a title I’m not sure we ever really held.

Surfing online finds that several of the major, social networking sites are more concerned with the “most awesome picture ever” and “look at this, it’s making fun of religion, again.”  Substantive articles on these sites are getting harder to find and are often modded down into oblivion because those that can think for themselves are far outnumbered by the mobs of idiots, giggling with a two-year old’s mentality.

When these idiots do happen to pay attention to the news, they are far more concerned about whether people like Susan Surandon supports the war than whether our soldiers are forced to live in rat and cockroach infested quarters while they try to rehab their battered and broken bodies.  They don’t want to know about the horrors of war or how the Surgeon General of the United States is blaming the troops for leaving food in their rooms and that’s why the rats and cockroaches are there.

The mice and cockroach issue was something that, in fact, the command did address last year, and that was due to soldiers leaving food in their rooms. We policed that up, and the rodent problem and cockroach problem has been corrected.

Forget about the fact that this a hospital facility that is crumbling and the rats and cockroaches are getting in through the cracks and holes in the building.  No, let’s just ignore everything, blame the soldiers, and see if some famous person supports the war.  Then, we’ll align ourselves according to who is our favorite famous person.

It’s absolutely ironic that misanthropic people continue to try to educate other people and try to make the world a better place, when we really despise the whole lot of you.  Entertainment is supposed to be a temporary diversion from the harsh realities of life.  It isn’t supposed to be life.  The propaganda machine, however, runs so efficiently that the unwashed masses no longer think for themselves and cannot see that they have been made into manipulated pawns in the corporate machine.  And, still, I fight on, hoping that, one day, it might all change and people will wake up from their consumerist stupor and start thinking again.

Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens is at it again.  He’s introduced a rehash of DOPA, from last year, into the Senate.  Officially known as S.49, it’s been dubbed DOPA Jr. because it is nearly identical to last year’s Deleting Online Predator’s Act that passed in the House but went nowhere in the Senate.  The new bill requires any school or library that receives federal subsidies for the Internet to block many interactive websites.  It is written vaguely enough that it would include, Wikipedia, blogs, and social networks, such as MySpace.

Senator Stevens, predictably, said that we must think of protecting the children and that is why this legislation is necessary.  Besides blocking interactive sites, Senator Stevens also wants sexually explicit sites labeled clearly.  Failure to do so would result in jail time.

While I have stated my problems with Wikipedia before, banning the world’s most-used reference site by schools and libraries is absolutely idiotic.

Labeling sexually explicit websites is also a bad idea because most blocking programs would then block the entire content.  There are many websites with sexual content on them.  Some are more explicit than others.  Many are educational sites.  Teenagers should be able to access these sites and learn from them because the schools are doing a terrible job of sex education and most parents still will not discuss the topic with their children.

Constitutionally, it is not the government’s right to tell us how we can spend our time online.  If we want to waste it talking about our sick cat or reading the kama sutra, that is our right as individuals.  The government should never be making these decisions.  You should.

What Senator Stevens has introduced is web censorship hiding behind protecting the children.  He wants the Internet censored so that the government has control over what can be seen or read, eliminating debate online.  Add to this the constant tracking we are about to suffer and you no longer have freedom.  We have turned from a nation of unique individuals into a pack of idiots who’d rather be safe than free.

Since this bill would also block things like Google, Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, etc., why don’t we just take it a step further and ban children from the Internet until they are 18?  If they go online, then the parents go to prison and the children are forced into group homes where they have to read approved books by the government.  Better yet, let’s just ban Mr. Series of Tubes from ever introducing any kind of legislation ever again.