Conspiracy Theory

 

By David Shamah, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2004

 

Once upon a time, you went down to the grocery store for your canned goods, hopped across the street to the butcher for meat, then maybe down the street to the bakery for bread and treats.

 

Then they invented the supermarket – to make things “easier” for you.

 

Once upon a time you went to the bank and handed your bankbook to the friendly teller, who would take care of all your business with a smile, and maybe hand you a toaster or calendar on special occasions.

 

Then they invented the ATM – to make things “more convenient” for you.

 

Are you seeing a pattern here yet?

 

The old local market was around the corner or a few streets over, and was staffed by a nice, friendly grocery man who probably delivered big orders right to your house. The bakery had fresh stuff all day long, and the butcher would cut your meat order exactly the way you wanted it. Now, you have to drive long miles to the supermarket, wasting gas and time, take whatever cuts of meat you find in the freezer, make do with packaged white bread, and of course, stand on line for 15 minutes or so waiting to reach the cashier. And heaven help you if the price on the product is lower than what the cash register scanner displays! See, it’s easier for the grocery merchants to distribute groceries to a big store that serves many neighborhoods. Easier for them, not necessarily for you! Same deal with ATM machines, self-service gas pumps, and warehouse office or home maintenance supply “super- centers.”

 

Some may find the modern methods of doing these things easier, too, but that’s beside the point: Business today works like the way it does because the system benefits the service and product providers, not the consumers. “They” are not necessarily interested in your opinion on the matter. The lesson here is this: Beware of innovations that claim that they will “make your life easier” – chances are that they really are designed to make some corporation or government institution’s life easier.

 

Let us extrapolate this lesson to the computer world. Information is accessible as never before, thanks to the Web. Computers are faster than ever, and are responsible for so many things we take for granted today that it would take years of these columns to list them all. But behold: All of these innovations provide conveniences because someone, somewhere, is making a buck off the original implementation of the idea. For example, along with the unprecedented information access the Web affords, we have to take the spam, pop-up ads, hacked credit card databases, etc. It’s a tradeoff.

 

Some tradeoffs, like the supermarket or the self-service gas pump, where you don’t have to shoo off the attendant asking to “check” your oil (amazing how they always find that you’re low!), seem like a good deal for us. Personally, I’m cool with the idea of the oil company or grocery distributor is making more money – live and let live, I say. But some deals are far more Faustian – they’re only going to do us more harm than good in the long run.

 

The relational database, which has been a boon for business and has made so many features of modern life possible, like credit cards, has some drawbacks for us, the consumer. The authorities, whether government or financial, know almost everything there is to know about us these days. Period. If you live and work and have ever used a credit card, have a telephone, a car, and live somewhere, you are part of the Machine. And there’s no escape; some places don’t even take cash anymore – when you rent a car you HAVE to use a credit card - so unless you’re living in a cave, you’re part of the Big Database.

 

Will anyone ever use the knowledge they have about your life against you? In my opinion, there is just too much information to pore through for government to bully you around just for the fun of it, unlike on TV. Unless you do something really bad or “they” want to get you (and you’ll know quite well that they’re looking for you), it’s unlikely that the Big Database will give you any more trouble than it gives anyone else (i.e., the usual bank statement or credit card “mistakes,” etc.)

 

But, because it’s easy to crunch information and numbers, you are more likely to end up labeled as a statistic, who is now no longer an individual but part of a “market.” This is already very common; when you download a “free” program that requests information about preferences and an e-mail address, you’re basically supplying more data that gets added to the Big Database (and no, they don’t sell your information to anyone else – they just “share” it with their partners marketing department!). The process of checking you out to see what makes you tick is considered even more important in the post 9/11 world, and more people than ever support the idea of government cracking down on “troublemakers.”

 

Here’s what you have to worry about: One day soon, there may be an “employability database” that has your name or number in it. If you don’t fit a profile, you won’t get hired, regardless of how well you do on an interview. The same will hold true for bank credit and other services you need. If you’re not on the A list, you’re out! In today’s security-conscious world, there is no doubt that more precise databases and search engines will be implemented and put at the service of more social institutions. Note that nothing new needs to be invented for this to happen – it’s basically a political decision, because the technology to really crack down and keep tabs on everybody is already there, and has been for a long time.

 

From there, the next logical step will be to weed out the “bad seeds.” If you’ve offended the law or your credit provider in any way, your name or number could get “flagged” at airports around the world, causing you to be detained for hours while they check to see exactly why you are so dangerous. A politician looking for something “meaningful” to do might decide that something needs to be done about a group or social component that you are somehow associated with. Or, you could be checked out by some organization interested in seeing what you’re doing with your computer!

 

I know what you’re thinking: “Now he’s really going over the paranoid edge!” I direct your attention, then, to http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howPrivacy.shtml, which presents a discussion of exactly how the RIAA (the umbrella group representing music companies in the US) figured out whom to sue when they wanted to crack down on people sharing music files. And how did they go about it? Simple: They got a court order to check out ISP log files, and checked the customer database of dynamic IP addresses distributed to customers at the time a download took place. And then they had their lawyer send a letter to the offending party.

 

Sounds Orwellian, no? But 1984 was 20 years ago. Nowadays it’s a piece of cake to get your vital surfing statistics. Surely you realized that your ISP is logging information about your connection, knows your name and address, and has records of each and every Web site you visit?

 

Friends, short of a Luddite-style revolution or the end of the world as we know it (where’s Y2k when you need it?) there is nothing you or I can do about any of this. And don’t complain that “nobody asked me” if you wanted this kind of un-private world. As I mentioned, “they” didn’t do it for you. They did it for their own convenience.

 

So here’s your chance to get back at “the man,” at least just a little. If you are going to share files with friends, or if you want more security on file transfers, download an ingenious program called Mute. Mute does two things: First, it sets up an indirect transfer route for your file. Most P2P programs connect you directly to the server you’re downloading/uploading to, and the direct connection is logged by both ISPs. Mute looks at all the computers in the network and sends your file through several of them (at least 5 random computers), so it’s not easy to tell where a file came from or where it went. More importantly, Mute uses an encryption system to broadcast IP addresses between clients and servers. Instead of an address like 10.0.0.1, you address shows up on the Internet and in ISP log file as something like X7667CFSFD876GH76876. When you connect on the Mute network, the encryption keys are first exchanged so both IP addresses can identify each other as secure before the file is transferred. It’s a small thing, but when you use Mute, you almost feel like a person again, and not just a number in a database.

 

Download Mute for free from http://mute-net.sourceforge.net. There are versions for Windows, Macs, Linux and Unix systems.

 

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