Category: Notes From The Electronic Cottage

Producer/host: Jim Campbell
Topic: Do you rely on the news from established news organizations like Reuters? Maybe you go to U.S. Government sites to seek objective information that your tax dollars have paid for. Alas, these days it’s difficult to really trust either source of information. Reuters just discovered photos it had put on the web from the battlefront in Lebanon had been doctored in Photoshop, and the U.S. Government has been classifying an increasing amount of information as secret, and doctoring or removing from its web sites information that isn’t classified. What’s a citizen to do?

Producer/host: Jim Campbell
Topic: It’s tough to lose a part of your community under any circumstances. When that loss is of a 24 karat gold crap detector, radio maestro, and ace reporter who is only 54 years old, the loss stings all the more. But Dave Piszcz lives on, and his life challenges us to take up the tasks he accomplished so well but has now left behind for others to continue.

Host/Producer: Jim Campbell
Topic: The U.S. is now issuing spanking new passports – with RFID chips in them. The State Department swears these new passports are full of all sorts of security measures which makes it impossible to copy them, skim information from them, or do anything else that might shake our confidence in the usefulness of devices that may one day store not only our pictures and personal information, but also our fingerprints, iris scans and DNA profiles. But guess what? On almost the same day that the U.S. posted all those reassuring (as long as you don’t mind being chipped like cattle) words, there was a demonstration of how to clone an RFID passport. Feel more secure?

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.

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: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11704.html. For the recommendations of the Association for Computing Machinery, go to: http://www.acm.org/usacm/Issues/EVoting.htm. For the report of the Brennan Center for justice, go to: http://brennancenter.org/ and click on the aptly-named report on The Machinery of Democracy.

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.

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?

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.