Notes From The Electronic Cottage

Host/Producer: Jim Campbell
Topic: Get a bit of spam in your electronic mailbox? No surprise – the great majority of email moving across the Internet actually is spam. The good news is that the amount of spam is actually decreasing a bit. The bad news is that what’s left is a lot more dangerous. But you know that, right? No? Maybe we’d better talk about this a bit.

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Host: Jim Campbell

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently asked the question: “Was the 2004 election stolen?” No matter what your personal answer to that question, we all want our votes to count in future elections but the rollout of unproven and problematic electronic voting machine technology for the 2006 election makes a lot of pretty high end observers nervous about having every vote count. Listen here to understand why, and check out these recent reports on electronic voting machines for yourself: For the report of the National Academies of Science, go to: www.nap.edu/catalog/11704.html. For the recommendations of the Association for Computing Machinery, go to: www.acm.org/usacm/Issues/EVoting.htm. For the report of the Brennan Center for justice, go to: brennancenter.org/ and click on the aptly-named report on The Machinery of Democracy.

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Host/Producer: Jim Campbell

Topic: So the saga of the NSA spying on Americans without any court order goes on. Several suits have been brought against AT&T for cooperating with the NSAand handing over the telephone records of millions and millions of Americans­ in fact, even setting up a special room in AT&T’s San Francisco routing center to make monitoring easier for the NSA spooks. The Justice Department has stepped into the suits invoking the old “state secrets” argument, and AT&T has quietly changed its privacy policy, essentially claiming that it owns your information and can do whatever it wants with it. But it ain’t over yet: listen up ­ and relax, the NSA won’t be on the other end of this broadcast.

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Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Topic: Congress is considering creating a database of all of the grants and contracts awarded by the federal government so that taxpayers can see what their taxes are paying for. Oh wait–no contracts because corporations objected? Okay, well, at least a database of grants-well, some grants. In that spirit, we look at a few recent examples of how taxpayer dollars are being spent, including a grant to figure out how to restrict taxpayer access to government information. Consistency-what consistency?

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Producer and host: Jim Campbell

Topic: If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Sorting Hat. Now there is a Sorting Door project, only this one doesn’t tell you which house at Hogwart’s you should join. Instead, it speculates on how our lives will change when RFID chips are everywhere, and the information they provide can be joined together in huge databases. And just to show that technology ain’t all bad, we also look at electronic book readers, which are getting better than you think.

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Host: Jim Campbell
“It’s summer but Washington is still buzzin’. In this edition, we take a
look at a few recent actions of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial
branches of the federal government that will affect our lives in the
electronic (and every other) realm, and, in the eyes of many, not in a
particularly positive way.”

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It’s pretty neat when you can find out where you are by consulting the satellite stars. GPS technology is really great when you need to find out where you are in your car, and get directions to where you’re going. But it might not be so great when others want to find out where you are, how fast you were driving, or, using a different technology, just what you’re listening to on your car radio. All of that is possible today. Be advised.

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This edition of the Electronic Cottage begins a series on keeping your
business in the digital realm your business and not the government’s or some
other busybody’s. We start by taking a look at the development of
cryptography, a way to hide or disguise messages so that only the intended
recipient can understand them. In these days of the surveillance society, a
little personal cryptography might not be a bad thing.

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