Tech NO! Thanks Judi Cole!

I love this man, he and I think alike!!

Tech-No!

By Arnold Ahlert

Last weekend a friend from out of town came to visit. I have known him for a few years, but our relationship had never gotten to the point where I had ever seen his family or been to his house. Now I am quite familiar with both, courtesy of his I-Phone. And while most people carry around pictures of one's family, his house was another story: in order to show it to me, he logged on to Google Earth and, in combination with the zoom capabilities of his phone, I was able to get a good picture of where he lived. He was thrilled to show it to me. I was decidedly less thrilled that he could.

Last August, it was reported that the town of Riverhead, NY was using Google Earth to locate backyard swimming pools which they cross-checked with permit applications to see if those pools had been built legally. They discovered 250 illegal pools and collected nearly $75,000 in fines. When I read that story I wondered how many people thinking they were sunbathing in private (perhaps nude) had no idea they were being spied upon by their local government. I wonder how many Americans don't realize that such images, once captured, could then be downloaded to the internet--for international consumption.

Far-fetched? The Wikileaks document dump is many things, but first and foremost it is an exposure of information that the purveyors of that information thought was private--exactly what the residents of Riverhead could have reasonably assumed about their own back yards. In both cases such assumptions were completely erroneous.

At airports, Americans' expectations of privacy are now officially irrelevant. One has a choice of a completely revealing body scan, or the groping of one's body by a TSA agent, as a condition for flying. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has announced he is putting together a new bill that would include up to a year in prison and fines of up to $100,000 for anyone caught reproducing the body scan images, which like images obtained from Google Earth, could easily be downloaded onto the web for public consumption. No doubt the irony that Mr. Schumer is attempting to criminalize an aspect of a problem created by government itself is lost on the Senator.

As for the scans themselves, al Qaeda is hard at work attempting to make them functionally obsolete. A jihadist online forum translated by experts at the SITE Intelligence Group reveals that terrorist bomb-makers and doctors are combining their talents with the hope of producing a surgically implanted--and completely undetectable--type of bomb composed of liquid explosives stitched into the abdominal cavity. TSA head John Pistole assured the public that TSA agents would not be doing body cavity searches because "you have to have some external device to cause that initiation," he said. "That's what the advanced imaging technology machine will pick up: any anomaly outside of the body" (italics mine.) Perhaps Mr. Pistole can't imagine a fuse being tucked into a certain body cavity or a fuseless device being detonated by a radio signal. One suspects al Qaeda operatives are far less myopic.

The common thread here is that privacy is becoming obsolete, and its demise can be directly traced to the advance of technology. Yet if it were simply the advance of technology and the public's acquiescence to it that were the problems, one might be less concerned where all of this is going.

Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the public is not merely acquiescent. There has been a generational transformation in the public's understanding of privacy. In short, older Americans value privacy. Younger Americans prefer exhibitionism.

That is a paradigm shift in our culture.

Perhaps such a shift was an accident waiting to happen. Yet the idea that millions of Americans spend inordinate amounts of time twittering, posting on Facebook and YouTube and other sites dedicated to Andy Warhol's idea that everyone wants their "15 minutes of fame" is evolving into far more than just a yearning to be noticed. A generation of younger Americans is getting quite comfortable with the idea that privacy has very little, if any, value. It is getting comfortable with the idea that there is virtually nowhere in the public arena where one can have any reasonable expectation that they are free from scrutiny.

And if the town of Riverhead, NY is indicative, the "public arena" now includes the outside of one's private property as well.

There is also something else I've noticed, though I'd be the first to admit such observation is strictly anecdotal. The ability to communicate without talking, or engaging in face-to-face interaction seems to be creating a generation of what might be charitably called socially dysfunctional individuals. That is an observation the friend mentioned above reinforced when he showed his I-phone to my wife and said, "my whole life is contained in that thing." No doubt he was exaggerating, yet that is the sense I also got at a recent dinner party I attended, where the entire conversation revolved around which of the latest phones had the best features.

Pardon me if I could care less.

Is there a line in the sand? If so, it might be temporary. The last generation of Americans who remember what it was like prior to the ubiquity of technological advances is heading toward their golden years. Those behind them will never know a world where the urgency of "being in touch" was superseded by the urge for "a little peace and quiet" at the end of a long hard day.

On the other hand, never underestimate the power of teenage rebellion. Perhaps some day in the not-too-distant future, when mom, dad, grandma and grandpa, are busy tweeting and texting away, the kids may decide the "new frontier" is a world away from the ubiquitous technology that fascinates their elders. And just to tweak the old folks, they might do something "radical" like running around outside--without bringing along their GPS tracking devices so their parents can't instantly locate them.

Am I a Luddite? This column was typed on a computer and emailed to my editor. But if you think you can reach me on my cell phone 24/7, think again. That little annoyance stays off unless I'm expecting someone to reach me, or I want to make an outgoing call. I have this quaint idea that my time is my own, and that includes getting away from technology as much as practically possible. That makes me a man woefully behind the times--or one on the cutting edge of a rebellion.

Here's hoping it's the latter.