Monday, October 1, 2012

How We Should All Emulate Janet Napolitano

Whatever you may think about her politics, one thing the head of the Department of Homeland Security should understand better than the rest of us is security. So it behooves all of us to consider her personal security practice, which Liz Klimas explains here:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/heres-the-drastic-measure-janet-napolitano-took-to-protect-her-own-online-privacy-would-you-do-it-too/

Is this possible for those of us who do business online? Yes, it is. This web site does it. While Priscilla King, Gena Greene, and Saloli Ani Godagewi definitely receive e-mail, we receive e-mail only addressed to our screen names and related to our e-businesses. We don't use e-mail to communicate with people we know in real life. We don't use our real names on the Internet, nor do we use our screen names in the real world.

Grandma Bonnie Peters unfortunately learned about e-mail from real-world friends who didn't know enough people in the FBI (this was before DHS existed) to protect themselves, and used to use e-mail for personal correspondence, but has completely closed that e-mail account and no longer uses that e-mail provider now.

Even if you enjoy instant long-distance communication with real-world friends, this web site recommends that you never type any personal information, e.g. any part of your real name, address, your actual date of birth, your home or cell phone number, the names and ages of any relatives, or any specific travel plans, into a computer. If it's accessible by a regular modem, it's accessible to convicted felons.

Pictures of children? No matter how adorable they are, share them only with people who you want to encourage to look at your children. That means real mail, or better yet in your actual home. Why hand your children's pictures to a pedophile?

Travel plans? No matter how unimportant you think you are to national security (or how unimportant you think the security of your nation is to the rest of the world), your identity and travel plans could be valuable to Al-Qaeda. Never make travel plans online. Never disclose your real name before you physically arrive at the station. If this means "Don't fly until the airlines develop security plans more realistic than collecting identity information ahead of scheduled flights," so be it.

Birthdays? Awww. Don't you enjoy getting birthday cards in the e-mail? Deal with it. Your actual date of birth is too easy for identity thieves to use. If people can't be bothered to call or write in real life, how valuable are their birthday greetings anyway? If you want to do the thing right, your online date of birth would be the date on which you created your cyberspace identity. I regret to say that I allowed someone else to set up the cyberspace identity of "Priscilla King" and don't actually know when my online identity was e-born (I think it was off by a year or two), but the important thing is that Priscilla King, the cyberspace entity, was not born in the same month or year as the living person who writes the Priscilla King blog. After all, if you're over age 21, the only people who really want to know how far over age 21 you are would be identity thieves...so the important thing is to foil them.

Does this kind of security consideration limit what I can do online? Yes; for one thing, if I decide to start dating again, online dating is out of the question--one of the first things I learned from friends in law enforcement was not to let myself be photographed unnecessarily, or privately, in the sense of "allowing private citizens to store your photos in low-security locations like albums or wallets." But I see these restrictions on my online activity as a good thing.

Not only is it important to keep my real-world identity out of the hands of thieves and terrorists; it's also important to keep most of my life in the real world.

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