Our Dirty (not so) Little Secrets

Our Dirty (not so) Little Secrets

Relax- this is not X-rated.

It’s something that parents should share with their teenaged children. In fact, it’s something that we wish our parents had shared with us, when we were coming of age.

First fact of life- Unless one is born, raised, lives and dies on a deserted, uncharted island, there is no such thing as privacy- anywhere. For instance, our ninety-five-year-old mother never once paid a bill on-line, never once opened an on-line bank account, and went through life thinking that her financial information, her medical information, and even her school records were strictly off-line…fat chance. Even her father’s immigration to the United States, in July of 1901, is detailed on-line, and so is everyone else’s. On the other side of our family, the fact that we were able to determine that our great, great, great, great grandfather fought in the American Revolution, and what he was paid for his services to the young nation (it wasn’t much, by the way) was found, courtesy of the internet. The fact that his father was indentured for seven years, to pay for his passage from the British Isles, was also found, courtesy of the internet.

Second fact of life- Don’t let our government, the mainstream media, nor politicians of either party ever fool you. Whether you are the president of the United States, a government employee, a corporate employee, a sole proprietor in business for yourself, a student, or for that matter, an indigent, our government can and will, without warrant, spy on you. They have been doing this for many years. The fact that you do not know this is merely because you haven’t, as yet, done anything to warrant prosecution. We have even arrived at a point in time when governmental employees, not pleased with recent election results, can and do eavesdrop on the president’s “secured” telephone lines, and release transcripts of his conversations to the media in order to embarrass, humiliate and sabotage any chance of his doing his job safely and securely.  If they can do this on “secured” White House telephone lines, it’s assured they can also do this at his former residence, in a Manhattan building that bears his name. His predecessor can deny, deny, deny all he wants to, but this is the same predecessor that told Bill O’Reilly that there was “not a smidgen of corruption” in an Internal Revenue Service that targeted private citizens who were opposed to his policies. This same former president’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, perjured himself in a congressional hearing when he said that the government was not collecting phone data on its citizens, so why would any sane person believe him when he says that Donald Trump’s telephone lines were not tapped, ever. The media will keep telling you about Trump’s ties to the Russians, but this is a lie, too. If there were any such ties, we would have heard about it by now. Rest assured that Hillary Clinton would have told us long before Election Day, after gaining the information from her supporters in the government and in the media.

Third fact of life- Dissuade yourself of the fallacy that filing your taxes on paper forms, hand written, means that your social security number and financial information is secure, simply because you didn’t e-file your tax returns. This is another fantasy. All of the information provided on your tax returns, regardless of how filed, has been logged in on government computers, which is why your earnings are reported on a social security statement, mailed yearly, which enumerates your earnings going back to your first part-time job as a teenager. Names can change but social security numbers never do.

Fourth fact of life- Anyone with a substantial dose of technical expertise, and a stubborn intent to do so with “due diligence”, can and will find out anything they want to about your own personal life, regardless of the nature of what you believe to be secret, which is why we get spam e-mail on how to maintain or reduce our blood sugar, why we get weekly phone calls from different sources offering to extend our warranties on our automobile (they know the make, model and year) , and why we get mailed reminders that the warranties on our appliances have expired. If your children run into credit issues, the collectors will call you wanting to know if your child is available to the phone, even when they haven’t lived with you in a decade. This is also why a prospective employer can go on-line and retrieve your history of traffic violations, not to mention more serious peccadillos from your past.

So while the entire world can know each and every little “dirty secret” you think you hold in your heart, so now can the world know all of the dirty little secrets that our intelligence communities hold in their confidential file folders.

Just ask Julian Assange.

 

-Drew Nickell, 10 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

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