Beware of Technology That is Not as Anonymous as it Looks!
Posted by ThePaladin on February 7th, 2008
Greeting Citizens of the Realm!
The Paladin has had a few moments from his work in constructing the web site to give thought to a recent national news event that makes quite a statement about personal privacy and technology.
You see, about 6 months ago, The Paladin was experiencing problems text messaging back and forth with his wife (we had never actually text messaged each other before). For some reason, The Paladin’s phone was not receiving any text messages sent from his better half.
After much experimentation, it required a few days worth of help from Verizon’s customer service department to figure out the problem. However, during that time, The Paladin had more than one conversation with the Verizon engineers. He was a bit startled to find out that they were looking at all of his text messages back and forth with his wife. It was at that point that The Paladin realized that these messages were all being saved in a log at Verizon!!!
Little did The Paladin know at the time that this very fact was about to gain national attention six months later when Detroit Mayer Kwame Kilpatrick would have over 14,000 of his text messages recovered from a SkyTel server and used against him in a court of law.
The Paladin thinks that this would be an excellent time to point out that in the defense of your computers against the Anti-Programmers, protecting your personal information is certainly a primary objective. This is an issue that will be addressed in some detail on this site in the future.
And once again we see that it is knowledge (or the lack thereof) that is the most effective tool against the evil works of the Anti-Programmers.
It is a lesson that I do not believe Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick will soon forget…