Penn & Teller PCC articles by Penn Jillette | Reprinted with permission. |
| |||
---|---|---|---|
| |||
I have all my personal files encrypted to CIA
specifications. If Hussein wanted to know about that crush I had on the smart blonde
production manager, his intelligence staff, working around the
clock for a year could not break the code and read my diary. Of
course, any bubble head that spent an evening listening to me
rant could guess the password quicker than they could figure why
I like Russ Meyer better than Steven Spielberg. So much for
privacy.
What the hell do I have to hide? Is someone going to pay a cryptographer to discover I couldn't find a date to Ghost, so I went with Rob "Running" Elk and we both thought it was a piece of dog dirt? I mean, what am I worried about? And what are you worried about? We don't have to protect our privacy until we get that menage a trois going with Uma Thurman, and I for one am not holding my breath.
You don't even need the encryption, just name all your private
text But again, I'm lying to you and we're all lying to ourselves. As I said, this is a non-issue. No one gives a good goddamn what we're writing. Let's face it, all of us PC Computing readers could die simultaneously and we'd barely get a mention in Newsweek. I doubt Kurt Loder would even find out about it. So much for people snooping on us.
But there is one place even our pitiful privacy can be violated
and that's on an airplane. You fly, you know what I'm talking
about. On the airplane you sit next to someone. And that
someone often wants to talk to you about your computer. And that
someone is never someone with whom you want to hang. You never
have anything in common with people sitting next to you on an
airplane. People next to you on airplanes don't even know
they're doing a remake of "Night of the Living Dead," let alone
have an opinion on it. They say stuff like, "Oh, you have a
computer? I refuse to use a computer. I'm boycotting them. I
think the world is too impersonal, empty, and high tech already.
Look what computers have done to the rain forests."
So, you offer them free membership in a pro-vivisection
organization just to shut them up and you get to typing. But
they read over you're shoulder. They always read over your
shoulder and if you hate that as much as I do, I have an
I was good and didn't violate my parole when airport security
took away my buck knife and colors. It wouldn't have bothered me
at all except the buck knife was a freedom present from the
motorcycle club. But, I don't need a knife to protect my
You say the information on this computer is safe and the screen
doesn't allow anyone to read over my shoulder. I hope you're
right because I'd rather not have to kill again and go back to
prison. But I will if I have to. And if the second offense
means I get the
| ||
|