Category: Notes From The Electronic Cottage

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.”

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.

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.

Host: Jim Campbell

Topic: In this edition we ruminate on the possible effects of recently revealed NSA domestic phone call monitoring and other government spying on our personal privacy, and what we might do to mitigate the effects of that apparently unlawful surveillance on our lives.

Notes from the Electronic Cottage, 5/11/06
Host: Jim Campbell
Topic: Yup, still more on personal privacy in the digital age. This time we look at some things we can do to reduce our vulnerability to unwanted intrusions and worse–in cyberspace.

Power suits, power lunches, power diets ­ all swell if you are of a certain frame of mind. But how about power protection for your valuable electronic gear! That’s real power – and the topic on this edition of Notes From the Electronic Cottage.

In this edition of the Electronic Cottage, we continue our series on privacy in the digital age. Tdoay, we look at the collusion between government agencies, which must operate under legal guidelines when they collect information on citizens, and private data aggregators, which operate under no such controls. The result? Government agencies such as Homeland Security spent about $30 million taxpayer dollars last year to buy data about U.S. citizens that the agencies would otherwise not have been able to collect. If you care about your personal privacy, you may want to begin leaving as thin a trail behind you as possible in physical space as well as cyberspace.

Part of our ongoing series on privacy in the digital age. This edition deals
with privacy in the commercial world – from companies amassing huge
databases about customers to those same companies losing control of that
data and what it means to you as a consumer and a citizen (the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, after all, buys information about citizens
from commercial providers that it is not allowed by law to collect itself).

Host: Jim Campbell