Sunday, July 1, 2012

Red Flag Warning: The Days of Big Brother Are Here

The Watchman scans over the parapet, gazing out into the far distant horizon, searching for any sign of danger, ready to raise the red flag in warning. Today he sees a apparition of a ghost looming over the land, a black cloud that hangs low, with threatening flashes of lighting across the sky. What is he really seeing? The ghost of Big Brother.

For those graduates of the recent mediocre public school system, Big Brother was the omnipetant hand of the state, that invaded every aspect of human life in George Orwell's classic, 1984. Big Brother was every where via audio and video circuits spread out like a spider's web across the world. Orwell saw the world wide web long before there was a world wide web, as well as the inevitable downside concequences.

Big Brother is sneaking all across the land in a seemingly harmless manner. Little by little the eye of Big Brother peeks here and there, with most citizenary not any more aware than when they first groggly wake up after a long night at a party. How is Big Brother doing this? Self-digital data capture or to use an Orwellian term, SDD.

Here is how insidiously SDD works. First the victim is enticed to buy some new fangled toy. Digital camera, iphone, computer, GPS unit, iPod, and etc. To operate the thing the owner has to upload a bunch of software from the vendor selling the item. In that process everything about the owner is collected and placed on a server. The owner is now digitally tracked, regardless of how much the vendor promises not to do so.

Second, the new toy has wonderful features. My new MacBook Pro has this thing called built in video capture. So I can either take a snap shot of my ugly mug or if I feel extra stupid, a whole video of me doing wild and crazy things. This is just one of the many SDD apps of the system. When apps are updated more data is captured about the owner and their habits. With our other toys, we record all sorts of wonderful and silly things. Everything from the family christmas photo to discussing how a company is going to illegally get rid of waste. All of it stored on a server or hard drive, almost forever, retrievable by someone in the future.

Thirdly, with the modern marvel Al Gore's internet invention, the toy owner can sign up for a whole host of digital connections to the entire world. E-mail and web based apps such a FaceBook, Twitter, BlogSpot and so forth. Almost everything done on a computer is captured somewhere, somehow. Cell phones now are Captain Kirk's dream Tricorder of Star Trek fame. In due course it will be able to take a sonogram of your heart as you feel the first pangs of the big MI, send it off to your cardiologist and call 911 all at the same time. Again, every bit of data is recorded somewhere on a server, just waiting for that curious reporter to plaster your picture or words all over the world when you run for dog catcher.

There it is my friends. The eye of Big Brother is opened by the very victim themselves. That is unless your smart. The Associated Press ran an article about the Penn State scandal and a comment from the lawyer for the late Joe Paterno's family caught my eye.
Wick Sollers, the lawyer for the Paterno family, said in a statement Saturday that it would be inappropriate for the family to comment on the contents of the emails because the family didn't possess them.
"To be clear, the emails in question did not originate with Joe Paterno or go to him as he never personally utilized email," Sollers said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/30/report-ex-psu-president-okd-not-reporting-abuse/#ixzz1zNuMOwtg
We may never know what Joe knew or when he knew it about Sandusky's abuse of boys because he was smart enough not to use e-mail. As a lawyer once told me, "if it isn't written down, it never happened."

So be warned friends. Think before you release SDD to the world. The days of Big Brother are here and he gets his information fix directly from your own hand.

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