Social Engineering: high tech crimes require low tech legwork.

This is a true story. It happened in one of America’s most technically literate cities. A municipal employee was on the street, tinkering with a “smart” parking meter. This meter accepts credit and debit cards, and recognizes pre-paid parking cards.  A young man approached the technician and gushed about the gadget. He said he’s fascinated with technology, and wants to work in the field some day.  He asked numerous questions about the meter’s functions, answered generously by the city employee, who clearly relished the role of the expert.

The “kid” then returned to his lab, where he and several other researchers were exploring ways to hack the smart meter system. For instance, if parking is free on Sunday, why not make the meters think every day is Sunday? Better yet, what if, instead of deducting money from pre-paid parking cards, the meters added money? Unlimited free parking for our friends, that’s what.

Hackers have a very twenty-first century name for the street-level part of this research.  They call it “social engineering.” That’s because “working a patsy” would sound tired, not wired.

The Reasonable Reporter will now present a meditation on social engineering, prompted by a weekend excursion to a movie called Law Abiding Citizen. The film is an imaginative story of high tech murder and mayhem by an accomplished social engineer.  Go see it, despite the reviews, which are astonishingly tepid. Especially since the film could be described as a melding of two legendary predecessors. Death Wish meets Enemy of the State.

Everyone from the estimable Roger Ebert to the gang at Rotten Tomatoes finds the movie’s plot implausible. This is troubling evidence that Americans have a distorted notion of technical crime. Learn this, damn it: There is no high tech crime without low tech legwork. In other words, social engineering.

The Reasonable Reporter does not wish to sound snotty, but for all your Tweeting and Skyping and YouTubing, you people are remarkably unhip when it comes to the ordinary scam artists all around you. You are so technically evolved, apparently, that you no longer fear a good old-fashioned con job – involving, you know, a guy chatting you up, pretending to be something he’s not, in order to make a rube of you.

But it’s happening every day to technically sophisticated people. The office assistant who quits her job to make thousands of dollars working at home! It doesn’t occur to her that she’s facilitating crime, even when the boss, whom she’s met only online, instructs her to receive large cash transfers from important clients, deduct her own pay, and then send the rest of the money to offshore accounts.

Right here in Nevada, a business hires an independent contractor to help with the marketing effort.  The contractor gains unrestricted access to the client data and is able to email to himself as much of it as he wants. Down the road, he opens a competing business, using those valuable contacts, as well as financial data he gathered with the cooperation of the business owner.

God forbid the Reasonable Reporter bring up voting machines again. But seriously folks, one of the most-discussed polling place attacks is simply an old-fashioned two-man con. One guy creates a diversion at the check-in table while the other guy reaches around to the reset button on the back of the machine – some models have one – and wreaks election-day havoc.

We really must lose this outdated image we have of cybercriminals as social misfits in dark apartments who gain system access magically by tapping away at their keyboards all night. Watch some old movies to reintroduce yourself to the art of the con. Remember Psycho? Janet Leigh wouldn’t have been at the Bates Motel if she hadn’t pulled off a spectacularly successful feat of social engineering.

If you like the bloggers you have, you get to keep them.

Choice and competition, by God, energize every field of endeavor. Here’s hoping you’ll welcome this humble offering of choice and competition. Of course, if you like the bloggers you already have, you get to keep them.

After a somewhat miscalculated career change, the Reasonable Reporter returns, with high hopes and apparently decent prospects of rejoining what is dismissively described these days as the mainstream media.  (MSM, in the shorthand of bloggers.)

The benefits of stepping back for a year cannot be overstated. Among them, a chance to absorb from a different perspective the degree to which people hate the mainstream media. The criticism falls roughly into several categories. Biased, lazy, and dumb are the top three, in that order. There’s more where that came from, and yes, it’s painful to listen to.

Some of the criticism is warranted. The Reasonable Reporter, who has not been a reporter during this time, is the first to call out a missed angle.

Some criticism is astonishing. More than one person said that he or she had never spoken with a reporter who recounted the conversation accurately. Never! Never is a pretty big word, but these speakers didn’t believe they were engaged in hyperbole.

Some of the disdain is patently unfair. Not surprisingly, harsh assessments issue from the very people who avoid contact with reporters, and who, coincidentally, are often at the center of dense and complicated stories.

Enough about Nevada. The picture is bigger. This week, critics nationwide have screeched like fingernails on a blackboard, after two citizen journalists with a micro camera blew the lid off ACORN by treading where no professional journalist could have. ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which according its own description, is committed to scoring victories for social and economic justice. It receives millions in taxpayer money to fuel its fight.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the two reporters – actually, the man is a filmmaker and the woman is a college student — made the rounds at various urban offices of ACORN posing as a pimp and a prostitute. In city after city, ACORN employees dispensed sympathetic advice when the pair confided plans to open a brothel featuring underage girls smuggled from El Salvador. In the most recent video, they were even offered help transporting the girls across the Mexican border. They have posted their work at the rate of one video every couple of days, generating a steady drip of trouble for ACORN, and massive discomfort for ACORN-friendly politicians.

Commentators on the right have excoriated the mainstream media for failure to immediately report this story.  This is day five, and the mainstream media are still ignoring it, one of them bellowed after the third video dropped.

Most of these commentators are highly placed in dominant TV and radio news-talk outlets. Ironically, most of them have never spent a single day of their lives as a working reporter, which used to be the required route to the kind of positions they hold.  Most of them could, if they wanted to, walk across the hall and encounter a working reporter who might explain that just because something potentially explosive finds its way into a newsroom, spotlighting it ten minutes later is not a good practice.

Try for just a moment to imagine that you are the biased, lazy, dumb reporter in the biased, lazy, dumb MSM newsroom on the day the first secret ACORN tape arrives.

REPORTER: Hey boss, it’s a couple of white kids posing as sex workers, and the nonprofit organization is telling them how to evade taxes and engage in human trafficking.

NEWS DIRECTOR: Wow… my news instincts tell me there’s a lot more to this…  I predict before it’s over, you’ll see nonprofit employees confess to murdering their husbands and running their own whorehouses.

REPORTER: Geez, really?

NEWS DIRECTOR: Never fails, kid. The crazier it looks, the more serious it is. Trust me, this is big stuff! Get right to work, we’ll run this at the top of the hour.

REPORTER: Yes, sir!  Right away.

Sorry. Even the biased, lazy, dumb media are still more careful and skeptical than that.

There are most certainly reporters already working on ACORN. Through normal journalistic methods, the ACORN story would take years to play out. The organization has a lot of protective links to power, and a large reservoir of good will in many communities. Very little, short of this hidden-camera sting could have pushed ACORN so squarely into the foreground, nor pushed Washington to look so hard at ACORN’s warts. (OK, it wasn’t a hard look. More like a quick peek and a loud gasp. Rarely has Washington moved so fast to pull its support.)

The filmmaker and the student may have altered history at the same tectonic level as the MSM’s fabled Woodward and Bernstein. The filmmaker and the student deserve the Brass Balls award for courage, the Bright Bulb award for ingenuity, and the Dumb Luck award for earthshaking results. They broke open a huge story, but Woodward and Berstein they are not. Who knows where it will lead, but understand this: finishing it will require know-how that our two intrepid citizen reporters don’t have. Go to it, MSM.

Pulling the plug on radio

Today, the Reasonable Reporter will pull the plug on her radio career, in favor of a challenging new pursuit that starts in mid-September. The new gig is outside the media. It’s an exciting and long-overdue change. There is nonetheless an emotional tug-of-war in process, as the professional comfort zone is left behind.

The broadcaster’s life has been a source of variety, creative triumphs, close friendships, and spurts of personal growth. (It’s also offered bitter disappointments, personal betrayals, and many dysfunctional relationships. How could two decades worth of anything be otherwise?)

Mostly, though, it’s a field that rewards big thinking and teaches adaptability. The lessons learned will continue to serve.

The Reasonable Reporter has spent recent weeks contemplating the ways in which today’s radio business resembles today’s housing market. Broadcasting speculators binged in the 90s, buying up far more property than they could reasonably expect to maintain. The binge drove the up the price of a radio signal, especially a signal in a nice neighborhood. (Was it 16-times earnings? The Reasonable Reporter can’t remember the multiple, but she remembers it seemed a bit like paying three-quarters of a million for a 2,000 square-foot ranch house with a shopping center across the street.)

Then the value began to drop, as listeners discovered new media alternatives. Many owners are left with property that’s producing less – maybe a lot less. Unlike a house, which would collapse if you began to pull out its support beams, broadcasters were able for some time to disguise the diminishing value by dismantling the product, beam by beam.

The product is cheaper to produce, but weaker now as a result. Not that there weren’t inefficiencies to tweak. There were. But here’s what’s magical about working in radio. There’s just a degree or two of separation between the radio listener in his car, and the back-office operation of the station. In most broadcast operations, every employee is very close to the end product, and that’s historic, not recent.

This is a business where every person serves a mission-critical function. Every person’s performance reflects on the product, negatively or positively – and audibly, by the way, even if that person never goes near a microphone.

This is why we once leaned so hard on a particular phrase that it became an industry cliché. “It’s a people business,” we used to say.

In those days, everyone with any longevity was retained on the basis of energy, commitment and authentic contribution. Creative entrepreneurs thrived. But the tools of entrepreneurship have been largely stripped away, and the people who applied them have gone elsewhere. It’s still a people business, but it’s been a long time since anyone has actually said so.

As the Reasonable Reporter leaves the business, she mourns its entry into its lowest period since she entered it. At the same time, she is determined not to sound like the cranky and embittered talent who spent the mergers-and-acquisitions decade in chat rooms devoted exclusively to their invective and their lamentations for the lost good old days.

Radio is resilient. The industry will reinvent itself, as it has done twice previously. Once, when television eclipsed it as the dominant venue for home entertainment. Once again, when FM killed AM for the delivery of music.

It will reinvent itself, but it had better hurry. The reinvention has so far been leisurely and uninspiring. It is stalled in phase one nearly a decade after we began to discover that teens no longer consider radio to be a cultural imperative.

The older demographics were a safe harbor for a time, but that time is almost up, and we’re still undertaking our reinvention as if the mountain will come to us. We’ve stubbornly applied our long-cherished old formula to new media, as if that should be enough. It works in a limited fashion. But it’s not enough to save us.

For her many friends in the business, and for the hard-working talent who continue to bat home runs in a creaky old stadium, the Reasonable Reporter hopes to see the industry adopt greater urgency in the matter of its reinvention.

Meanwhile, this space will soon be devoted to discussions of a particular subset of law. (As an avocation, unrelated to the new gig.) The name will need to change, since “Reasonable Reporter” will be only half accurate after today. More details to come.

McCain leaves everything on the table in Sparks.

In an odd exchange following John McCain’s town hall meeting in Sparks this week, the candidate deflected a question from the Reasonable Reporter by suggesting that she might be a conservative. There would be no justification for telling the story, and it would remain untold, except that Anjeanette Damon alluded to the moment both in her Reno Gazette Journal report, and in her blog.  Damon’s account was picked up by another blogger who shortened it. The effect of his edit was to leave the impression that McCain’s words were directed at her.

OK, it’s not exactly accurate to say McCain deflected the question. He didn’t allow the question. He cut it off cold after a few words, and talked over the ensuing attempt to follow up.

McCain was moving away from an uncomfortable subject – that core conservatives still find him unsettling as the Republican nominee for the White House. He’d brought this particular episode on himself, by articulating two days earlier sentiments identical to Barack Obama’s on what it would take to save social security. >

It’s now been well chewed over in the media that McCain made conservatives nervous about the possibility of a payroll tax hike by telling George Stephanopoulos “everything should be on the table” with regard to social security, and by invoking the 1983 Tip O’Neill-Ronald Reagan bipartisan solution for same.

In Sparks, it was RGJ reporter Damon who opened the social security door when the candidate told local reporters that a recession is a bad time to raise taxes, and he won’t do it.

“Even payroll taxes for social security?”  Damon asked.

When Damon tried to pin him down, McCain asserted several times that he would not raise taxes, and also repeated several times that for the purpose of negotiating a social security solution, “everything should be on the table. “

The Reasonable Reporter said to McCain that he sounded as though he was addressing two separate things. Meaning, as if it needs to be spelled out, that leaving everything on the table during a social security discussion raises the possibility of a tax increase, and it is, in effect, all one subject.  The subject is taxes.  Damon got it, McCain didn’t.

McCain repeated. No new taxes, and everything on the table.

The Reasonable Reporter then suggested – or began to suggest – that McCain’s persistence in promoting an “everything on the table” approach while simultaneously promising “no new taxes” is an example of what makes conservatives skeptical of him.

The presumptive nominee might have been more tolerant in a one-on-one interview, having been alerted that the reporter represents a medium with a largely conservative audience.  He might have treated the topic as respectfully during the interview as he did during the town hall, when a Douglas County man took the microphone and said that he’s unenthusiastic about McCain, and needs reassurance that the candidate will carry out the conservative values of Douglas County voters.

In a one-on-one conversation, McCain might have started with the same answer he gave to Douglas County. (Burning up 5 minutes and 34 seconds of the ten minutes that would surely have been our time limit.)  Or the Reasonable Reporter might have respectfully interrupted after a minute or so, to ponder with the senator a matter that may be keeping Nevada’s down-ballot Republicans awake at night.

Can Republicans running for state and local office count on McCain to deliver conservative voters to the polls?  In their fight to retain a one-seat majority in the state senate, and a teetering hedge against a two-thirds Democratic assembly, what can McCain do to help Nevada candidates?  In an environment where the sitting Republican governor’s coattails have been clipped, can state and local Republican candidates look to McCain’s coattails?  Or are his coattails also too short to ride?

In the Reed High School gym, McCain had declared himself to be the underdog. He told the audience he needs them to bring it home for him.

In the press room, he was unwilling to indulge this discussion. McCain rolled over the Reasonable Reporter like a freight train. He’s never voted for a tax increase he said; he’s always supported tax cuts. He’s never had any conservative express fear to him that he will raise taxes; he is unaware of any conservative who doubts him on taxes.

Unless you, McCain said to the Reasonable Reporter, might be “one of that conservative group. “

Leaving the Reasonable Reporter to wonder aloud as she and her colleagues packed up to leave, why, from McCain’s perspective, that was such an effective put-down.

Presidential candidates should be protecting the personal information of reporters.

The Reasonable Reporter is good and steamed.  She has lost track of the times since Nevada became a swing state in 2004 that she’s been asked to send personal identifying information via unsecured means to the Secret Service for a background check. To protect elected officials, the federal government asks reporters to compromise their own security.

Hey presidential candidates… want to seem savvy?  Develop a data security policy for dealing with personal background check information, and insist that the feds use it. Start protecting the personal information of reporters.

Then send out press releases patting yourselves on the back for it.

It is way past time for the government to get hip about cybercrime, and stop exposing citizens to identity theft.  Not just the feds.  All the way up and down the ladder from municipal utility districts to the White House, the attitude about the personal data of citizens is outrageously cavalier.  In many cases, personal identifiers are collected unnecessarily for the task at hand.

When big batches of identifiers are lost, stolen or misplaced, the announcement is always the same.  “We have no evidence that any ID theft has occurred.”  Of course!  You will never have such evidence until it’s too late.

In congress they’ve produced useless cybercrime bills for more than a decade, while failing to do basic things that would offer some measure of real citizen protection.  Name the category. Identity theft, hacking, spam, porn.  The laws are big, ugly, smelly, expensive dogs with just enough teeth to bite the mail man.

The federal anti-hacking law, for example, is currently being misused to prosecute a woman who’s accused of inducing a teen-aged girl to commit suicide by posting gossip about her on MySpace.  This law was intended to prevent unauthorized persons from taking control of computer systems that don’t belong to them, not to grandstand in a grief-stricken community when a murder charge is unavailable to prosecutors.

The Child Online Protection Act was struck down last week by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having been challenged on first amendment grounds the morning after it passed in 1998.  (The original name of the case was ACLU v. Reno.  That’s Janet Reno.)

COPA never went in to effect because even a first-year law student with a D average could see that it was unconstitutional on is face.  It didn’t require dozens of lawyers and a decade of legal review to recognize its obvious legal and practical flaws.

Can-Spam Act?  Let’s see. The Reasonable Reporter recently went on a wild goose chase from one alphabet soup agency to another, trying to get comments about an ID theft scheme targeted at one specific regulated industry.  She finally got a bit feisty when she was passed off yet again to someone else, and nobody would talk on the record, and she was finally told that – well – we don’t talk about it because we really can’t do anything about it.

Yes you can, you twits!  Start enforcing the part of the Social Security Act that says our social security identification numbers are to be used only to manage our government retirement accounts.

Presidential candidates: One of you will win, and the other will go back to the senate. Please, make it so.

By the way, it’s been said that Nevada is at the top of every bad list. Not so.  On October 1, NRS 597.97 will prohibit businesses from sending personal identifiers such as social security numbers and dates of birth by email without encryption. Thank you, Nevada legislature.

UPDATE:  The Reasonable Reporter was offered a fax number by the United States Secret Service. Thank you, Secret Service.

Nevada voters do not have the luxury of being dumb.

Are the voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies?

The question was posed before the Supreme Court this week by Las Vegas attorney Dominic Gentile. He argued that the term limits question was not complex, and the voters understood quite well the initiative’s potential effect, regardless of technicalities now raised by the legislature, which wants term limits tossed.

Are voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies? The question lingers, extending beyond term limits or any other single issue, inviting contemplation of complex issues and uninformed citizens. Of government mechanisms so intricate they can’t be understood without hours of study. Of what voters want, versus what they get, and what they end up creating.

The term limits case serves nicely as an example of how simple concepts become complicated. The must-pass-twice requirement for constitutional amendments, intended to ensure deliberation, leaves a two-year hole for legal maneuvers that add layers of complication. The current challenge to term limits has its roots in a confusing bout of court activity that occurred between its first ballot victory and its second, two years later.

For a future source confusion, look at PISTOL, the oddly-named eminent domain initiative from 2006 that seemed conceptually straightforward. Nevada voters overwhelmingly approved it once, understanding well their own outrage at the notion that one citizen could benefit by enlisting the government to take property from another citizen.

Then the 2007 legislature set out to improve PISTOL before its 2008 appearance on the ballot. The PISTOL improvements exist now in statute. But wait, that’s not all. The legislature also passed a resolution – call it PISTOL Version 2 — to amend the constitution again. Version 2 will need a second legislative approval in 2009. Meanwhile PISTOL Version 1 could pass again in 2008.

Leaving aside whether PISTOL Version 1 needed improving – many believe it did – the whole mess has become stunningly complex.

Are Nevada’s voters a bunch of dummies? Or does the preceding make your head spin? Who could expect the average voter, busy with life’s daily details – jobs, kids, homework, volunteer work, etc – to untangle the mess that lurks beneath the straightforward question?

How about taxes? A recent example of tax complexity appeared on the 2006 ballot. AB 554 from the 2005 legislative session required voter approval to perform some taxation housekeeping. Did even half of the voters understand what this bewildering item was, much less why they were voting on it?

Look beyond the ballot, at Dillon’s rule. Not at whether home rule is desirable, but at whether its absence makes things confusing. Busy voters have to follow the progress of local issues from city hall to Carson City and back. Are the voters dummies if the reason for the trip isn’t immediately apparent?

And now, in Washoe County, here comes the mother of all complex issues. A recent proposal by investment firm Goldman Sachs to lease Truckee Meadows Water Authority assets is about to be vetted in public. Politicians find the possibility intriguing. The TMWA board, comprised of five politicians and two political appointees, voted 6-1 to explore it. The public seems to hate the idea, with generalized fear of privatization as the most-cited reason for knee-jerk aversion

There is layer-upon-layer of complexity to be peeled back in the proposed TMWA transaction. Analysis related to pricing, to employee compensation, to local control, to the structure of the entity. And there’s the ever-present, but never-discussed effect of monopoly.

TMWA was statutorily exempted from PUC oversight when the non-profit utility was created. Theoretically, if the voters don’t like the direction, they can take vengeance on the elected officials who sit on the board. We’ll see whether that’s well understood by the voters or the office holders. But as usual, whatever the outcome, Nevada voters don’t have the luxury of being dumb.

Rush Limbaugh, big money, and Marconi’s old medium

Traditional media, recently declared dead, or at least critically ill in the face of new media’s rising commercial viability, has a pulse after all. Rush Limbaugh’s new contract is a 400 million dollar expression of confidence in traditional media, and such expressions of confidence have been rare in recent years.

But news of Rush Limbaugh’s record-breaking contract has been discussed less in terms of its business significance, which is enormous in the context of a shrinking pie for old media outlets, and more in terms of whether he, or anyone else, should earn so much money. Even a local conservative talk show host in the Limbaugh mode – which reveres capitalism and personal achievement — asked, “how much is enough?”

The Reasonable Reporter must disclose that she is part of the Limbaugh trickle-down economy, having been paid in Limbaugh dollars for at least half of what is becoming a lengthy radio career. It’s often said, and it’s not hyperbole, that Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio. For those in the newstalk arena, it’s not in dispute, and the dollars, if not the politics have flowed to all the personnel of the stations that carry the show, whether or not they appreciate the association. (Many do not appreciate it, and some are even embarrassed by it.)

This is not to say we’d all be flipping burgers if not for Rush. But lots of people have the jobs we have because of who and what he is, and because of what he fashioned from a product that was gasping for air in 1988, in the face of competition from… hmmm… a new medium that had at last realized its commercial viability. FM radio had matured, and after some years as a novelty, had become a mainstream medium, draining the ad dollars away from the AMs. Superior-sounding FM was the new preferred venue for music, effectively placing a pillow over the faces of the top-40 AM powerhouses that had driven the industry for more than two decades. AM radio had to be reinvented as a talk-intensive product.

It’s worth noting that AM radio had already reinvented itself once, becoming almost entirely music-focused – the iPod of its day for a youth market seeking cultural identity — after television stole radio’s place in the family’s living room, replacing it as the preferred venue for drama and comedy.

It may also be important to note that Rush himself often refers to the AM talk product, or at least his portion of it, as if it were not part of the traditional media. And while he’s probably correct from a content perspective, the delivery device is strictly old media.

That brings us to content, which is still king. Rush is discussed primarily in terms of his political persona. His success is partially attributed to his early years as a disc jockey, which gave him added dimension as an entertainer rather than just an analyst of current events. Both are important components of the man who is now a 400-million dollar phenomenon. But neither fully explains his success.

Rush Limbaugh’s success is built on instinct, and the Reasonable Reporter asserts that the conservative content initially mattered mostly because the time was right for it. As heartfelt as his politics might be, everything about the Rush Limbaugh empire points to his instinct for the right move at the right moment, and for pressing the advantage when he’s gotten it.

The instinct plays itself out in his daily execution of the material, irrespective of the politics. He could be discussing cake recipes, and he would still have to locate the bull’s eye, topically speaking.

The instinct is larger, though, than what he says and how he says it. The instinct is manifest in his syndication model, and in the many ways he’s extended the product, including the early embrace of newsletters and podcasting. The instinct is manifest not just in the what, but the when and how, and how much.

But listen to the public discussion, from callers to the lofty desk of C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to the local talk radio station.

Adoration: He’s wonderful and he deserves the money. Excoriation: He’s a horrible hate monger who’s divided the country and it’s appalling that he’s rewarded in this way. We love him. We hate him. But by and large, we fail to explain what he really is.

Traditional media is shrinking at an alarming rate as the new media mature. The layoffs and contract buyouts are in progress. The newspaper is tiny. It has no heft as it hits the porch. Network television relies almost entirely on low-budget mindlessness. The iPod is the new radio. Minus the people who produce radio.

And yet, as the audience fragments, and the advertising money scatters in new directions, AM radio fares generally better than its battered counterparts, and a 400 million-dollar gesture of confidence has been made. It’s confidence in Marconi’s old medium, but only indirectly.

No pantyhose for Michelle: Mrs. Obama gets girly on The View

Hillary Clinton has voiced some concerns about sexism in the media, and for a number of reasons, the Reasonable Reporter has been quick to brush them aside. That’s mostly because three semester units of women’s studies backfired badly – crushing the capacity to give special consideration to female suffering in any circumstance except actual childbirth.

In that class, women students were instructed on the first day of the semester to count off, one, two three, four, then to stand together in groups. Ones gathered in one corner of the room, and the twos in another, and so on.

“Three out of four of you have been sexually molested by someone you know,” we were told. “So whichever group you’re in, for the moment you can consider yourselves the lucky ones, and look at the other three groups. Statistically speaking, all of the women you see outside your group have been sexually victimized.”

As it turns out, sexual victimization takes many forms, and if your brother brushed your buttocks with a can of Pringles while the two of you helped mom unload groceries in a tight pantry, that counts.

A full semester of this brand of nonsense was very clarifying, even at age nineteen. And so the Reasonable Reporter was startled all these years later to find herself doing victim math as Michelle Obama visited The View, where the five female hosts and the guest added up to a disquieting six. That means one “lucky one,” and a fractional remainder of a lucky one.

Good God, where did that come from? But this show, its success and its apparent importance to the presidential race – even peripherally — is difficult to fathom in the same way that class was difficult to fathom.

Aside from Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters, the Reasonable Reporter can’t name all five female hosts of The View. But here’s what they talked about with the prospective First Lady of the United States:

1) Diversity- Whoopi notes that every black woman she sees on television has gold teeth and can’t speak in complete sentences. Wonder how she missed Gwen Iffel and Condi Rice and Oprah all these years. And oh yes, there’s Whoopi herself, and unidentifiable View co-host number three, both black. And Mrs. Obama, who’s getting a lot of coverage. There are six regularly televised articulate black women, right there, with no gold teeth.

Formal diversity training isn’t as effective says Mrs. Obama, as conversations like this, where we discuss things like…

2) Pantyhose. Barbara Walters is on the fence about whether or not to wear pantyhose. Out of respect for Michelle Obama, she wore them today. But Michelle Obama threw Barbara a curve. She didn’t wear any pantyhose, because she’s five-foot-eleven, and she finds them uncomfortable.

3) Inevitably, kids and husbands came up. Barack Obama no longer takes out the garbage. Unidentifiable View co-host number two, the blonde, has a child with food allergies, and she makes a food chart for her husband to follow when he has daddy duties and she’s not at home. (Viewers are treated to a shot of the chart, which resembles a NASA flight plan.)

4) They brush lightly against politics. Ever so lightly. Unidentifiable blonde co-host is also an apparent political conservative, but she and Mrs. Obama go out of their way to convey that they can disagree on issues and still be nice to each other. No actual viewpoints are exchanged.

5) Well-toned arms. Mrs. Obama has revived sleeveless dresses, and by the way, she is often compared favorably to Jackie Kennedy.

6) Whether Mrs. Obama is proud of her country. Whoopi plays the offending first-time-I’m-proud-of-my-country sound bite, and provides analysis of the vocal emphasis. It was the first time Mrs. Obama was really proud, says Whoopi, not the first time she was proud.

7) Strong women. People aren’t used to strong women. We don’t know how to talk about strong women. Speaking of strong women, Hillary suffered sexism, says the prospective First Lady, for the sake of Michelle Obama’s daughters.

There was more, but it began to sound all distorted and far away, like an odd dream. Like a dream about the presidential primary debates during the umpteenth month of debating. The Reasonable Reporter found herself yearning for the sound of Hillary, uttering a tortured string of hedge phrases.

(Remember the Hillary sentences that made you want to gouge out your eyes with knitting needles? They sounded something like this: “We’ll begin to take steps toward taking a look at what can be done to move in that direction.” How smart Hillary sounds now.)

Michelle Obama has a difficult assignment. She has to play it straight, and smart, and tough. But not too straight, or too smart, or too tough. She came out of this okay. It was definitely not too smart, but that wasn’t her fault. Of the six women on The View, Michelle Obama was definitely the lucky one.

What do Jim Gibbons and Eliot Spitzer have in common?

What do Jim Gibbons and Eliot Sptizer Have in Common? Not a great deal, except that they, like the rest of us, have had their daily movements electronically tracked and recorded, and because they did, acts they considered to be private became public.

Spitzer, the former Governor of New York, was caught purchasing sex because the women he purchased it from were top-of-the-line prostitutes, and therefore he had to move large sums of money in order to pay them. The pattern of money movement suggested money laundering, which he was not doing, but it nonetheless brought him to the attention of the IRS.

Gibbons sent text messages to a recipient in whom the Nevada media has a prurient interest because of his pending divorce, and his rumored involvement with another woman. In an unfortunate failure of best practices, he used his government-issued phone, and the records belong to the public.

Could similar records have become available to law enforcement and the media before the advent of hand-held text messaging devices, and before banks had the powerful database technology employed for know-your-customer tracking? Certainly. But the two events spotlight the practical privacy concerns we all ignore every time we digitize our daily affairs.

Every single day, we sign away our privacy in return for the joy and convenience offered by technology. The average person makes the tradeoff multiple times a day, and is utterly cavalier about the possible consequences. It happens from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep.

iTunes, for instance, knows you’re a dweeb who listened to the most pointless song ever recorded — Come on Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners — 43 times in one week. Yahoo and Google also know what you like, if you know what I mean. Important or not? You never know until it becomes important.

Some years back when geo-tracking devices became widely available in cars, the Reasonable Reporter predicted, only half jokingly, that it would become more difficult to keep an extra-marital affair from coming to light. Not that the Reasonable Reporter condones extra-marital affairs, but she is a fan of privacy, and assumed that a large number of people would relate to the example. And there was certainly a point to be made that whatever convenience the service might provide, tracking every spot on the planet one chooses to visit could have a down side.

This was after the potential abuse of grocery store shopper cards was already being discussed. Recall the divorce attorney who delved into the ex-husband’s supermarket records, and made a successful case that if the guy could afford premium wines, he could afford more child support.

These developments seem primitive by current standards. The Las Vegas Review Journal reported this week that “Microsoft and Harrah’s just announced an interactive bar table that lets patrons order drinks, watch YouTube videos, play touch-screen games, and even flirt with each other.” The program will remember your favorite drinks, and facilitate snapping photos and swapping phone numbers with attractive strangers.

Hmmm… It’s almost impossible to count the ways this could become damaging on the morning after, or on some morning thereafter. Databases never forget.

Security agents at McCarran Airport are getting a detailed look inside your clothing. Anyone want to bet long it will be until those images end up on a website?

Soon, we’ll have toll roads. We will have them because it’s folly to think we’ll give up our cars, and it’s greater folly to think that the government can continue to spend a million dollars a mile to build a road, and still keep up with demand. We won’t and it can’t.

You’ll have a bar code on your bumper, scanned by a toll road reader to tax you by the mile. Or maybe an RFID chip. It will know where you went, what time you were there, and how fast you were going, but the speed check will be redundant, because of the black box under the hood, which the insurance companies are already lobbying to make standard.

There’s more. So much more. None of this is to bemoan greater use of high-tech devices. Technology makes us faster, richer, better and smarter, and we benefit from it every day. We just need to learn to be smarter than the people who own the databases.

Tired people say stupid things.

Last summer, when the presidential candidates were still wedged into their respective debate venues like too many SUVs in too few spaces meant for Honda Civics, and Nevada was still a campaign destination, the Reasonable Reporter was granted a sit-down interview with one of them. The time allotted was ten minutes.

The candidate arrived at the airport around dinner time, after a long flight from a state east of the Mississippi. He came directly to the event site, spoke to the assembled partisans for about 15 minutes, and then retired to a conference room for the interview, where he immediately requested a cup of coffee. His eyes were dull and dark-circled, and his skin had a grayish cast. The press coordinator said they’d gotten up at 4 a.m. after a late fundraising event.

(He. There will be no ambiguity about whether the candidate was Mrs. Clinton. It was not.)

The Reasonable Reporter often begins an interview with a politician by asking a question about his area of greatest expertise. There are several reasons for this, but mostly it’s a cover-your-cute-little-buns technique that ensures if the plug gets pulled early, there is at least one piece of tape containing complete sentences and a bit of substance to facilitate further research. God helps those who help themselves.

The coffee arrived, and the question was asked, and indeed, the candidate should have been able to go on at some length. The candidate, in fact, should have been able to hold up his end of a one-hour interview on just this subject, given his level of expertise.

He began to answer, and stopped in the middle of the first sentence. He started again, got about three sentences into it and then stopped.

The candidate looked helplessly at the Reasonable Reporter and said, “I know what you mean, but…”

He took a swig of coffee and said “Let’s start again.” At which point he fell back on a talking point, although it was clear that his original intention had been to deliver something more.

The months passed, and then there were three. They’ve all been tired for many months, and tiredness does wreak hell with the human brain.

If you have doubts, ask someone who works the morning radio shift, where wake-up time is 3:30 a.m., day after day after freaking day. Drooling at dinner? Yes, if you can stay awake for dinner. Reading a newspaper? Well, you can stare at the words, but on any given day, the meaning can be quite unclear. Calling your spouse by the cat’s name? It’s been known to happen.

Someone should study the performance of the American presidential candidates in terms of mistakes per day, and then factor in the length of the campaign, the number of appearances, time zones traveled, and hours of sleep.

The results might show an amazing level of competence considering the circumstances. The mystery would be why relatively few blunders – given the stress on the human machine — manifest themselves in such devastating terms. References to assassination, for instance.

Maybe tiredness allows a glimpse into their souls, and maybe tiredness just mixes up the marbles. And maybe the regional primary advocates are right, and the primary period is just too long. Maybe several regionals would leave the hopefuls functioning better, and put them back in the Senate where they could pay proper attention to the very issues they claim to want to solve, and all the inappropriate utterances would be made in the proper zip code.