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.

Utterly Transported

Originally Published on NevadaNewsmakers.com, Published: 6/5/2007 5:37:52 PM

Better than a movie. An incredibly long, three-part, guy movie with lots of fight scenes and hardly any female stars. The Senate hearing on the Big Transportation Bill was the best of the year in its genre, for conflict, cliff hangers, and a tight wrap-up that allows all the characters to come back for the sequel, Big Transportation Bill 2. It’s due out in 2009, and promises to be a bigger, bloodier and more expensive production.

 

Great moments: Senator Bob Coffin (D – Clark 10) challenges the governor to back off his no-new-taxes pledge in order to raise the tax on diesel fuel. Senator Randolph Townsend (R-Washoe 4) decides, about four hours into the epic, that there’s been enough rhetoric leveled at the governor, and says, in effect, “knock it off.” Paraphrasing, of course. Senator Townsend would never actually say “knock it off.”   Instead, he reminds the assembled that the Clark County transportation crisis has many fathers, including the Clark County Commission and southern Nevada legislators.

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Some members of Nevada’s news media were stunned, and others amused earlier this year when Governor Jim Gibbons said he’d heard rumors the Wall Street Journal might have been paid to run a story about the FBI probe into his activities on behalf of software maker Warren Trepp. The WSJ piece on Gibbons was one of many that ran on the paper’s front page, over many months, probing the business and lobbying connections of quite a few congressmen you’ve never heard of, in districts throughout the country. 

 

Once the snickers died down, the unattributed rumors dropped off the radar screen. Until this week, when the New York Times carried an unflattering recap of Gibbons’ interactions with the legislature, his campaign misadventures, and his stewardship of Warren Trepp’s product.

 

Speculation bubbled up again in the cold, fast-running current of Carson City politics about whether the nation’s most venerable newspapers might allow their product to be tainted by the influence of big-spending advertisers. And some here in the Silver State truly believe the rehash of the Governor’s troubles was dropped into the pages of the NYT to coincide with whatever final showdown might occur between Gibbons and the legislature in the closing week of the 2007 session.

 

Dropped by whom? It would have to be someone with both a stake in Nevada politics, and the ability to manipulate editorial decisions at of one of the most prestigious publications in the world. Only God and the Gray Lady know for sure.

 

The question, though, would be worth contemplating on a theoretical level if it could be severed from Gibbons and the presumed conspiracy. Repeated for emphasis, when you ISOLATE THE QUESTION from discussion of Gibbons and those who would revel in his downfall, it’s an interesting topic. How elastic are ethics in a struggling industry?

 

Declining newspaper penetration, and revenue erosion caused by a robust “new media” have prompted some organizations to drastically alter the news product. What other impacts might occur below the surface, as the financial picture worsens?

 

A profession can be ethically practiced only so long as there are four walls within which to practice it. As management teams seek above all to preserve the business, what will be compromised, and to what degree? Will blind eyes be turned to flirtation between advertising and editorial? How bleak would things have to be for a large-budget advertiser to successfully push a political agenda into the headlines? Anyone’s headlines, much less the headlines on the sacred pages under discussion?

 

Don’t snicker, because none of this is funny. Political operatives have been known to sink quite low. The wild card each time is who meets them in the basement.

 

The Reasonable Reporter hopes and prays there are always a few staid national news sources that leave fingers black and smudgy, and deliver honestly gathered and utterly reliable news. (To the extent that news is ever utterly reliable.) But the business will get more difficult and more desperate, and this is not merely a technological shift, or a demographic shift, or a phenomenon of post-literate America. It is all of those, but it is also the redefinition of an industry, with the attendant financial fallout, and all the unseemly possibilities that suggests.