There is nothing under the sun which will not be corrupted by the hand of Man.
The title of this post is from Deuteronomy (32:35). Elected officials beware.
In our time, the digital revolution has created a new class of criminals and a new class of detectives. This revolution was made possible by the binary code system (deceptively simple strings of plain ol’ ones and zeros introduced to the Western world by Gottfried Leibniz as far back as 1679! – appearing in his Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire). Without the invention of high-speed solid-state electronic processing of information in binary code, we would still be living in the analog world of the mid-1900’s when corruption was, by contrast to today, “small potatoes.”
In the mid-1900s, TVs displayed their fuzzy pictures by painting them on large glass tubes. Telephones were big, needed wires, and did nothing but carry voices. But the messages were rarely recorded. Cars were vehicles to get you from one place to another. But they didn’t broadcast your every move. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to a movie house. But nobody outside the theater knew what you were watching. Music came to our ears via radio or phonograph records, later, audio tapes. But no-one beyond earshot knew what you were listening to. Photos were made on film, which had to be taken somewhere to be developed and printed. But the photos weren’t viewable by everyone in the world. Banking was slow and often required you to go to the bank. But your accounts weren’t vulnerable to criminals in foreign countries. The reason? There was no internet.
To those of us old enough to have lived in the mid-20th Century, the improvements in technology which have since brought about all the marvelous things we now take for granted have been nothing short of startling. But even more startling are the ways our fellow men have so quickly and thoroughly corrupted each and every item of technology as it came along.
How convenient, the internet. Virtually instantaneous transactions of all kinds. Banking, commerce, buying, selling. But the proliferation of “security” firms and software indicates how insecure are your transactions. All your personal and financial information stored in the form of the little bitty 1’s and 0’s, with nothing but a few bitty 1’s and 0’s keeping thieves anywhere on earth from stealing your identity, money and reputation.
The security of your home, your car, your business, your personal relationships, your finances, your messages, your habits, all hang on the arrangement of flimsy strings of little 1’s and 0’s. The internet is a voracious vacuum, sucking up the world’s quadrillions of 1’s and 0’s. There is great wealth to be made with these giant piles of quasi-real bits. Somewhere, they are saved, filed, and distributed to anyone willing to pay, or anyone with a judge’s nominal okay, all the aforementioned 1’s and 0’s which divulge your financial transactions, messages, business and personal relationships, who you know, where you shop, what you buy, what you eat, wear and like. Your posted photos, videos, music, travel and virtually everything else you ever do, say, or use.
Your electric meters are also collecting your power habits. Are you using too much electrical energy? What hours are you using it? Your bills will reflect your government officials’ opinions about your private habits. Maybe you are using your electric toothbrush too much. Your gas meter will tell “them” about your home heating, water heating, cooking and everything else you are doing with gas. Your water meter also communicates back to the water company in binary. Are you bathing too much? Flushing too much? Watering lawns too much? All this information doesn’t simply stay in the archives of the electric, gas and water companies. It’s all available in the form of the damnable 1’s and 0’s to those with the interest and wherewithal to lay their grubby hands on them.
Passwords? Don't be ridiculous; whatever your passwords may be, they are recorded and read in the form of 1’s and 0’s. How convenient Leibniz’s simple binary system, no? Allowing an electronic device which can sort through millions of 1’s and 0’s at virtually the speed of light, until, for good or for evil, it finds the pattern it’s been programmed to search for. Maybe yours.
Senator Rand Paul politically announces the passage of his bill limiting the NSA digital “spying” on American citizens. That is laughable. It does nothing whatsoever to limit everything else mentioned above.
Now, why is today’s corruption different from that in the last century? Back in the day, political/corporate corruption might involve thousands of dollars. Which, at the time, seemed like a lot of dough. It was relatively easy to cover up this kind of corruption. Hand some official an envelope stuffed with $20 or $100 bills, tear up the envelope, and poof! No record. Over time, corruption has grown far more widespread and far worse in degree. Today it involves millions if not billions of dollars. These transactions usually don’t involve paper money but electronic transmittals through several financial laundries, each having its own stinking pile of binary 1’s and 0’s.
But the internet’s smelly pile of 1’s and 0’s also makes this magnitude of corruption more vulnerable to tracing, more easily exposed, because the internet allows the army of researchers and hackers in the white hats to dig through the bad guys’ puke-laden 1’s and 0’s, in their efforts to expose those whose feet of clay have slid in their own corruption.
As we are seeing in each day’s news (also brought to most of us by 1’s and 0’s) “Their foot shall slide in due time.”
