The US Has Been Digitally Penetrated

 

There have been a number of stories about our brave new electronic world lately, and they basically intersect with my interests on a number of scores, but time has just not let me separately expound on them--but that's okay by me. These things have a common thread.

For one thing, while part of the PATRIOT Act has been allowed to expire, the USA Freedom Act ( not a title any the less brimming with some Orwellian component) has restored the bits that probably are useful if not absolutely necessary. It just makes sense to me, from a Constitutional standpoint, that warrants shall obtain for legal review of collected metadata, but it seems dumb to me that we could expect that data to not be retained somehow. This looks like useful reform to me, and the article I linked to points out that this somewhat more US Constitution-compliant version of data collection and review is impelled, in part, by that rash boy, Ed Snowden.

Hillary Clinton's Email Issue isn't Relatable

I work in an office where email is EVERYTHING. We have regular back-and-forth emails between supervisors of different units to discuss procedures and save a lot of them to justify why we arrived at the procedures we have and how we arrived at them, so that if any question comes up, we can go back to the archives and understand what was going on at the time to generate whatever procedure we adopted or changed. Some supervisors have email archives that go back a decade or so.

If our email server ever goes down, we feel like amnesiacs, a little, with information we kind of recall, but are a little unsure of. It's stressful to have conversations that aren't written down so that they are transparent and available for later use.