3am Today

As I look at the world today, perched at my window in my office chair, I hear the news, politicians, scientist, health care workers preaching in the background about our current societies state of being as “The New Normal.”

For this, I do not agree. I feel this is more of an attempt to catalog the entire planet’s people, like herded sheep, pushed into different categories, statuses and prominence, as if to say “you’re ok to pass to one person, but you are not to another person.”

For the last four weeks, our entire planet has been inundated with the message from the same people as listed above, that “we must be tested,” with the message that it is for our own good and to save lives.

In that time, we have seen numerous cases in the news of botched testing, false-positives and false negatives. In one such case, a news crew from CBS found themselves looking at an empty testing site. In order to submit a drama filled story, they ask hospital staff at the testing site to act as patients.

As the airports around the world start preparing for the airlines – and the airlines them selves – to start scheduling what was a normal flight schedule around the globe, there is the plan that everyone entering or exiting a airport must be biometric scanned to include face recognition scans, health records exposed, PCR testing (Polymerise Chain Reaction) of all passengers and flight crew.

This only leaves one very scary scenario in place for anyone with two peanuts to rub together to create any kind of thought. All of this data is then shared around the world to governments, health care facilities, etc.

While we all want – as humans that we are – our neighbors to be in a healthy state of mind and body, we also must ask ourselves, what is going to happen to all of this data that is collected on each person, keeping in mind that these “test” all require for us to give up our DNA.

We must also ask ourselves, is that data going to be safe in the hands of the holder(s)? We’ve all heard of the data breaches from crackers – you can read more about that term from a previous post Hacker-vs-Cracker – to the likes of LabCorp, several hospitals, city governments, and most recently, a very large law firm in New York that handles 90% of all movie stars, singers, radio personalities and a vast majority of sports figures estates. And lets not forget about the breach of Equifax! By all rights, that conglomerate of a corporation with a history of troubles should have been shut down completely.

In all of the cases, the goal of the cracker is to extort money from the victim. But what if the ransom is paid? The short answer is: It’s to late! Gigabytes, and in some cases, Terabytes – Think Amazon AWS – of information has already been downloaded to some obscure location that would take – and in most case does take – years for law enforcement to find. The damage is already done even if the victim pays a ransom.

Do we as a global society really want this kind of information floating around? It’s not like the bumbling idiot in the programming cubical would think that maybe he/she should apply serious protection measures to the massive databases they are dealing with.

As with a lot of these breaches, it is later found out that a programmer removed whatever small amount of protection there was so they would be able to gain access to that database in order to test their code and failed to re-institute some measures before punching the clock to run out of the office to meet friends for a drink at the local bar.

In part two of this three post series, I’m going to discuss some facts about virus pandemics. I’ve discussed some of this in previous post, (Coronavirus COVID-19. What To Make Of It and What To Learn From It, What is Dengue Fever? and The sucker bet) but I feel that a lot more needs to be said about this.