Mobile Communications Versus Privacy

I Can See You

The location of a cell phone or personal digital assistant can be determined by either a GPS on the device or by triangulating with the signal strength of multiple cell phone towers.  While shopping around for a GPS that has a good outline of hiking trails, I noticed how easy it is to get a very accurate position with even more than three satellites… 7 satellites, in one example.

While some such as myself are strongly concerned about “mark of the beast” implants, we should be conscious of just how vulnerable we already are with cell phone technology, GPS devices, and GPS accessories built into new automobiles.

Even if a judge rules it (currently) unconstitutional to track your location for mass-surveilance, we know from experience how easy it is to create a loophole.

Here are some links for your research:

Article: E-tracking through your cell phone; February 13, 2006

Article: How to Trace a Cell Phone Location

“…inclusion of GPS technology in most mobile phones, and an improved ability to detect a phone’s location based on signals from local transmission towers…”

Article: Cops Need Warrant for Cellphone Location Data, Judge Rules; September 11, 2008

Article: Judges Reject Cell-Phone Tracking, November 17, 2005

Article: AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance; October 29, 2007

Article: First Location-Based Cell Phone Ads Get Privacy Thumbs-Up, March 25, 2008

Website: Reverse Phone Detective

Website: Addresses.com

Wikipedia: Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and was designed as a response to the controversial writ of assistance (a type of general search warrant), which was a significant factor behind the American Revolution. Toward that end, the amendment specifies thatjudicially sanctioned search and arrest warrants must be supported by probable cause and be limited in scope according to specific information supplied by a person (usually a law enforcement officer) who has sworn by it and is therefore accountable to the issuing court.

PDF: Memorandum Order by US District Court of Western Pennsylvania on September 10th, 2008

Combining personal and professional blog

Rather than maintaining two separate blogs, one personal and one professional, I’ve mused about combining the two. 

While some blog viewers may only be interest in my reflections on the sociology of technology, and others only interested in personal updates, a third group is interested in both topics.

So rather than limit my personal news to Facebook updates, I’m opening the door to doing that here on WordPress (BlogOfBryce.com).

The way to limit which posts you’re viewing on a blog like this is to select a particular category.  In this case, my personal blogs are in the category “Personal News,” while my sociology of technology categories are all of the others.

The scattered family and the Internet

In my opinion, much of the responsibility of the extended family has been shifting to the government over time due to the technologies of transportation and communication, but within the next generation we may experience a complete reversal, also due to technology, with responsibility being restored to the family.

 

Before the Industrial Revolution, extended families were more prone to be localized, and thus when one’s elders were unable to work due to age or illness, their children were the ones who would naturally care for them.  The immediate family was also more concentrated, with fewer square feet per person in a home.

Then along came the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, with mass production of goods and a flux of workers from rural to urban environments in Western culture… and away from the extended families of the agricultural revolution.  After their industrial revolutions, the West rolled over into the post-industrial and service oriented culture, producing services instead of goods. 

As the transportation industry grew, and the distance between the workplace and the home stretched, so grew the distance between family members.  This was somewhat offset by the influence of technology on communication, such as the shift from the postal service to Morse code to the telephone network and so forth.

Information technology has made some rapid improvements over just the last 20 years.

• Rotary phones have become obsolete. 
• Telephone networks have switched from analog to digital. 
• Email migrated from having a username for a bulletin board system on one person’s computer to having a unique email address. 
• Email addresses used to be limited to educational institutions and the government until around 1997, when public domain names became more available (HoTMaiL.com was one of the first non-educational email providers I heard of). 
• Cell phones grew to become the norm at about the same pace of email addresses becoming common. Payphones are hard to find.
• Instant messenger programs on computers and text messaging on cell phones provided an alternative to talking over the telephone long-distance. 
• Long distance and calling card providers beat each other into oblivion until all major providers could be counted on one hand.  Calling cards are almost unheard of. 
• Per-minute long distance fees are nearly obsolete, with digital telephone plans enabling the customer to call any two places in their country at the same rate. 
• DSL rendered dial-up obsolete, and cable based internet is doing similar damage to the DSL industry.

And we’re caught up to today, where video streaming is enabling people to share their lives over a great distance, whether posting an on-demand video file, such as on YouTube, or having two-way communication using almost free video conferencing, such as Skype.

The news that used to be shared only at the occasional extended family reunion (wedding, funeral, etc.) can happen on a regular basis and without much effort when using such technologies as RSS feeds, blogs, or networking web services such as Plaxo, or Facebook or MySpace.

Point: Extended families can restore some of that lost connection by using information technology.

 

Another concern that this Internet Revolution addresses is the economy.  While the cost of transportation has been an attention magnet recently, personal savings and increased life span is another problem to consider.  The baby-boomer generation was taught to plan for the “three-legged stool” of retirement: their own personal investment, their corporate pension, and Social Security.

The corporate pension is obsolete; Social Security will almost certainly be out of commission (or at least too insignificant to notice) by 2017; and with Americans spending on average 104% of what they’re saving, personal savings is completely out of the picture.  Don’t think so?  Do the math.  If you invested $2 million at 5% interest, you would have $100,000 earned in interest each year… before tax.  After tax, you might have $60,000 to $70,000 of interest to live on each year.  If you had only $1 million to invest, divide that net income in half.  If only $500,000, divide it in half again, and so forth.  Now do you get the picture?  Would you get even $20,000 a year?

That $70,000 might be enough for a young couple to live on right now, but with inflation increasing at least 3% annually, the cost of living will be increasing so rapidly that by the time you retire (assuming you’re 30 or 40 years old now), you probably won’t be living within your own means.

You might argue that living on interest alone is not necessary, considering that you’ll probably die before your savings runs out.  That’s possible, but there’s no telling where medical technology will progress to by the time you reach retirement age (when you are too old to provide for yourself by working).  Assuming that you will live 20 years longer than you can work, you will at least need 20 years of savings built up, including medical expenses that you are not bearing right now… if you are to live on your own, that is.

Point: Individualized retirement will likely be obsolete, requiring support from family.

 

Another trend that is being predicted is the transition of white collar employees out of the corporate office and into the home office.  The reason? In addition to remote access becoming more feasible with high speed internet, and safer with the security of 256-bit SSL encryption and thumb, iris or face scanning, or even typing pattern tracking, employees can be more accountable with screen monitoring and web cam exposure.  (My predictions on the influence of this technology on the education system will be covered in a future article.)

Curious about how much someone would sacrifice for time working from home, Dice Holdings conducted a survey of 1,500 technology professionals and found that 37% of them would take up to a 10% pay cut in order to work from home, so the desire is certainly there.  With more employees able to work from a home office, and possibly at hours of their choosing (depending on their role and considering that they are not available for family roles while in their home office), that may give workers the extra ingredient they need to support a family. 

For example, in a standard dual-income household, if young-enough children or old-enough elderly parents are requiring care, one of the working adults needs to be able to care for them.  If one spouse is working during the daytime, and the other is working during the evening, such a nuclear family could be cared for.  If one of the spouses was working from the home office, everyone would be in the household simultaneously.  That would not matter if the telecommuter was isolated in the home office, but saving 2 to 3 hours of telecommuting time would make family time easier.

While this method of working from home is not currently the norm, nor is it growing quickly enough to notice, it still presents an opportunity for extended families to become localized again, where they could live in the same neighborhood, pooling resources such as time and money, yet work for distant employers.

Point: Information technology and telecommuting will make extended family support more feasible.

 

In summary, the Industrial Revolution which scattered families apart has become history, and now we are transitioning from the service based economy to the Internet Revolution, enabling extended families and distant friends to maintain an improved sense of personal connection despite how many miles physically separate them.  As economic crisis approaches the retiring generation, families in close proximity may become an important element again, and the same technology which enabled the scattered family to stay connected at a distance may also be the vehicle which enables them to, ironically, meld together again.

The most humane method of execution?

Disclaimer: The content of this article may not be appetizing, as it deals with the history and possible future of executions in western culture.

When reading “The Revelation of Saint John” (a.k.a. the book of “Revelations”), I’ve sometimes pondered the following passage:

Revelation 20:4 (New International Version)

“I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.”

I put emphasis on the method of execution, beheading, since at least in western culture, beheading hasn’t been around for quite some time (since the Guillotine of the French Revolution) with the exception of France (until 1977, and even then, very rarely after 1905) and Germany. At the time the author wrote his prophecy, Roman citizens were executed by beheading (seen as more humane), and non-citizens were killed by crucifixion (a very long-lasting and inhumane method).

Ranging from hanging to shooting, and now the disputed lethal injection, the method of executing a convicted murderer has been shifting to that which is the most humane. The only argument now is, “Which method IS the most humane?”

One method that is under great scrutiny is death by lethal injection. One man who is on death row is now around 400 pounds, and he fears that the first injection, a pain-killer, might not be strong enough, and therefore the following chemicals would cause him pain while he dies.

Also, as reported in an MSNBC article, three men, Imam Samudra, Amrozi and Mukhlas (also known as Ali Gufron), are guilty of a bombing in Bali, Indonesia, which killed 202 people in 2002. Their lawyer is agreeing that they should be executed, but the real dispute is about the method of execution. Apparently, if they are executed by firing squad, they might remain alive (and in pain) for one minute.

Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging, and while I didn’t hear any argument from anyone about the humanity of hanging, I can imagine that suffocation wouldn’t lead to an instant death (several minutes, according to some writings).

Scratch out burning at the stake. I haven’t heard of that method for awhile, and I’m sure that it’s quite inhumane. Drowning is out of the picture as well.

The American electric chair is certainly not an immediate death, and electrocution does cause pain.

Going back to the MSNBC article about the Bali Bombers, their preferred method of execution is beheading. Their primary reason for this method is not that it is the Islamic traditional method of execution (although it is), but rather because it is more humane than death by firing squad.

And they’re not the only ones who believe that. The French revolutionaries were the very ones who in 1791 felt that both the rich and the poor deserved a humane execution, and the purpose of an execution was not to inflict pain, but simply take a person’s life. Thus the alteration of the 1307 Scottish Maiden into a sharper blade and a swifter execution.

While I don’t have a background in medicine, I did recently agree to be with a friend as he passed away (voluntarily) at a hospice after battling lime disease coupled with three metals in his system, and could only communicate by moving his eyes. After the doctor removed his air supply, he breathed on his own for a few minutes. After his breathing stopped, his pulse still went on for another minute or two, cycling the oxygenated blood to his brain. After that, his pulse stopped, and the time of his death was recorded (although I think his neural activity may have lasted a few more minutes).

With this in mind, even after his breathing stopped, he lived for a few more minutes, making use of the oxygen in his blood. If that oxygen was not circulated to his brain, he would last maybe a few minutes (according to teachings about the timing of CPR administration), but his consciousness seemed to be gone within seconds (even before his breathing stopped).

Similarly, with beheading, the head is removed immediately from the rest of the body, so the oxygen in the blood has absolutely no way of reaching the brain and sustaining consciousness. Thus, beheading may lessen the time between execution and actual death to only a few seconds.

In addition to reducing the time that pain is felt, it is also possible that no pain from the body would be felt at all in a beheading. The Department of Neurology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine studied the impact that nerve endings play on the pain you experience. See http://www.quadrabloc.com/ for their clinical trial summary and case report. Their technology stops sodium and calcium ion channels from opening up on your nerves, and thus a pain signal is not sent to the brain. When the pain signal IS sent to the brain, the brain is what generates the pain, telling you and your body to fix the problem. In other words, pain is all in the brain and is a result of your nerves sending it signals generated by sodium and calcium passing through an open gate in your nerves.

With that in mind, you can imagine what importance your nerves have on your feeling any pain. If the nerve lines which connect someone’s brain to their body was severed, I can imagine that they would feel no pain at all from their body. The only pain they would feel would be from their head, which has a direct connection to their brain. And I have no idea about how long they would remain conscious due to the amount of oxygen still in the brain.

As I have not heard of any actual medical studies reporting on the effects of beheading since the June 28th, 1905 French execution of Henri Languille, there’s no telling how much of my assumptions are true versus false. For that, we would have to rely on middle-eastern culture to do any studies.

Looking ahead, if they do perform some studies, and beheading IS found to be the most humane method of execution, I don’t think it would be too long before western culture followed its middle-eastern roots and adopted this method. After that method became the norm, it would then be more understandable for the passage quoted above (“Revelations” chapter 20, verse 4) which would link religious defiance with beheading.

Blog Introduction: Sociology, Logic and the Internet

Sociology

Rewind about 14 years to December 12th, 1994.

It was the end of the first semester of my Freshman year in college. All of us in the classroom had been attending an introductory Sociology class as an elective to broaden our liberal arts experience and give some balance to the more technical departments some of us were majoring in (such as chemistry, computer science, etc.). The last day of class before finals, my professor, with his full beard and misplaced glasses, had one last chance to make a lasting impression on the significance of the Department of Sociology.

Along with the department’s humble mission statement, likening Jesus to a sociologist (in Philippians 2:3-8), serving the most basic needs of people, the professor also distributed a report entitled, “What Can You Do With A Sociology Degree?” which was a list of actual jobs held by sociology majors from Ohio State University [according to a study by Timothy Jon Curry, also the author of "Sociology for the Twenty-First Century"].

That report was very easy for anyone to read, as it was only a one-page piece of art listing many of the “actual jobs held by sociology majors” ranging from a few you would expect (TV audience researcher; development and urban planner; research assistant; assistant personnel manager…) to quite a variety that you wouldn’t think had any connection to sociology! Here are a handful:

• Assistant Director of Surgery
• Real Estate Sales
• Farmer
• Dentist
• Peace Corps Volunteer
• Postal Carrier
• Computer Analyst / Programmer
• etc.

(You’ll notice I marked Computer Programmer, as that had been my area of interest and expertise since audio cassettes served as floppy disks.)

That wasn’t an immediate sale, but the professor also happened to be my freshman advisor at the college, and it was with a little more influence on his part that I added more sociology classes to my schedule and eventually adopted sociology as my major.

Fast forward a few semesters to one of my favorite sociology classes (and arguably the only practically applicable one), Statistics, which included computer programming (SPSS). In this course, one point of emphasis was that just because two factors happen to overlap does not mean that one causes the other. For example, because a dead frog is green and a dead bug is green does not mean that having the color green caused them both to die.

In the case of Ohio’s study, Tim Curry just happened to make that foolish assessment, declaring that because the postal carrier and the research assistant both majored in sociology, both of them were equally impacted by their major and were still equally involved with sociology. What Curry (and my sociology professor) coincidentally overlooked was how many sociology majors went to other fields… because they couldn’t get a job with a sociology degree.

Statistically, 80% of college graduates obtain a job that is completely disconnected from the field they majored in, and according to the one-page report I mentioned, sociology probably contributes to that average by having far less than 20% of its graduates moving on to a job in the sociology field.

Philosophy / Logic

On a side note, I did also minor in Philosophy, with Logic being my favorite subject. I couldn’t get enough of Logic with what was offered, so I went back as the professor’s assistant for a semester, grading all of the Logic homework and assisting the students outside of class time. That certainly helped to implant the logical line of thought (and I have a hard time watching illogical commercials without shaking my head.)

One piece of advice learned after graduation: Don’t bother using logic when arguing with emotionally-driven people… it won’t help you at all unless you can somehow lead them to do the reasoning on their own, in which case they’re selling it to themselves (and they’d hate to say no to the wisest person they know).

The Internet

Fast forward to now. I’ve been programming websites part time since 1995 (when I learned HTML by viewing the source of existing web pages), moved on to programming the back-end of dynamic (interactive) websites (ASP and SQL) since 2002, and have been working full-time as a web developer using PHP and MySQL since 2005.

When the professor who introduced me to sociology implied that the field would carry over to whatever you did, he was… right. I don’t want to be misunderstood as endorsing the major of sociology; I am simply stating that the line of thought that I developed when studying individuals and societies still applies to the field of the Internet, which is connecting data stored in computers with the minds of the people who use them.

Blogging IT

Even if it doesn’t have a significant impact on what I currently do, sociology and philosophy have helped me see through some different lenses than others in my profession. And so that brings us to the point of this blog, where I hope to voice some insights on the impact of technology on society.

The rest of this blog may seem to be unrelated to the sociology + technology theme. As my day goes by, whenever I’m not programming or actively thinking, some topic may surface that I feel called to write about. For instance, whenever I mow the lawn, I seem to think about politics. I’m hoping that once I finally get those thoughts onto “paper” (here), I might be able to mow the lawn with an empty head… or at least think about something besides politics.

So here is a sample of what I might write about:

• The future of education due to technology, if the travel and insurance industries are giving a hint… along with identity verification with web-cam and eye or fingerprint scanning

• The disconnect of families by mass transportation and the Industrial Revolution vs the potential reconnect due to the Internet Revolution
• Social security failing + personal savings shrinking + corporate pensions evaporating = the three-legged stool missing all three legs = …extended family support again? How might the web play a part?
• Are local church pastors shepherds or are they ranchers? Are they expanding and equipping the church, but not uniting it? What would connect the church body, bypassing “ranchers?” The Internet?
• Online gaming an offshoot of the Society for Creative Anachronism… an alternate identity?
• Stoplights on the main street. Is the red light’s timing for or against businesses?
• China’s one-boy trend… can one couple support two sets of parents?
• A popular culture of voluntary slavery
• Christianity and the Democratic Party… a moral conflict? (A very touchy subject.)
• Community versus communism; accountability and personal fulfillment.
• Video editing versus miracles: Will technology induce more doubt?
• Beheading. Will that trend come back with pity and a technological examination of pain?

With that said, I’ll get started right away by posting one article, and see where this blog goes. Feel free to subscribe to this blog (via RSS) in order to be notified when I post additional articles.