Ghost Whisperer "Slam" Season 3, Episode 11

The other night, I had the "opportunity" to watch the show Ghost Whisperer staring Jennifer Love Hewitt.  For reasons that escape me, Skeptic-of-the-Highest-Order housemate has become quite taken with the show.  Consequently, the other night was not my first "opportunity" to watch Ghost Whisperer.

Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as a woman who sees and speaks with dead people.  Live people wind up within her vicinity and they invariably have trouble with a ghostie.  The typical pattern of the show is that first she has to convince the live person or the dead person or both to allow her to help.  The live people are usually a bit put out by the woman who talks with spooks.  They become converts with a bit of "artful" persuasion and dialogue that sounds like a pamphlet for the local Spiritualist Church (albeit without the seances).  Sometimes the dead people are adamant that they are not going anywhere.  That changes of course by the end of the show.   Ghost Whisperer always concludes with the ghost being enchanted by and being absorbed by "the Light" of the new-agers.

The particular episode I watched the other night was called "Slam" [after "slambook"].  It was episode 11 of season 3.  "Slam" was notable because Jennifer Love Hewitt's character Melinda Gordon goes into a monologue about how anonymity on the internet turns everyone into big meanie poop-heads.  The speech is stilted and artificial.  One more reason to hate Big Hollywood as well as the push for everyone to give up their wallet info to the Watchers of the Web.  Hallelujah-- not.

"Slam" purported to be an online slam-book for kids in the local high school.  Even the popular kids were subject to written abuse left anonymously via entries under their names.  Of course, some vicious entries were left on pages and a kid died.  Since anyone could write anything on anyone else's page without leaving their own real names, golly gee willikers people die and stuff, m'kay?

I know that people have committed suicide based on what other people have said about them on-line.  That is not the issue I have with this particular episode of Ghost Whisperer.  The problem is that the issue of quasi-security vs. privacy is complex and multi-factorial.  In some countries, to expose one's identity is fraught with danger.  Social media has become one way in which radicals and dissidents can connect and fight for change.  Being an out atheist in Pakistan did not have the greatest outcome for one atheist in particular recently.  Sending e-mail to American relatives from a Vietnamese cybercafe has always been risky business.  Not to mention people who have had to escape domestic violence situations-- it's bad enough that our laws do not adequately protect them from battering partners and ex-partners.  For the producers to write in such blatant propaganda into Ghost Whisperer smacked of Big Hollywood advocating for Big Data.  NSA anyone?  Hello hello.

sapphoq reviews says:  The blanket statement that we should just hand over our wallet info and become part of Big Data in the name of quasi-security is not something that should have been interjected into a show about a woman who talks to dead people.  Recently, a popular business magazine published a piece on how business owners should jump on the Big Data bandwagon.  Since the NSA is so interested in our trivialities and what we say online, why shouldn't the savvy sellers of merchandise and commodities everywhere profit from the sudden move towards transparency on the part of everyone in order to benefit the shadowy Big Government?  Monsanto continues to poison the wheat and The Patriot Act has ensured that we as a country will continue to be insane and misinformed puppets.  Ghost Whisperer is not a show that I would recommend to anyone with two brain cells left to rub together. 

From CyberCrime Fighters: Tales from the Trenches by Felicia Donovan and Kristyn Bernier

From CyberCrime Fighters: Tales from the Trenches, by Felicia Donovan and Kristyn Bernier.  Indianapolis: Pearson/ Que, 2009.  paperback, 308 pps., including index.

I picked up this "gem" while browsing at a bookstore.  The title caught my eye.  I went through it and basically found a bit of sensational writing and nothing new.  The information contained in the book about how to be safe on the internet is already out there in abundance.  The authors come out as against P3P (peer-to-peer file-sharing) and also against the use of temporary and anonymous e-mailers.  The former stance is no surprise.  The latter stance is incongruent with the message to be safe from the bad cybercrime folks and stalkers on the web.  There was one item of interest to the aspiring hacker: the authors include the urls of several businesses that sell surveillance equipment.

Felicia Donovan and Kristyn Bernier use seventeen chapters and two appendices to tell us how to be safe on the Internet and how cybercriminals allegedly operate.  The chapters include ones on spam, sexual predators, online dating, identity theft, cyberstalking, and social networking.

Chapter Three devotes itself to "Cyber Crime Tools You Won't Believe."  The subtitles are: Wi-Fi Tracking, Packet Sniffing, Bluetooth Locating, What is an I.P. Address? [oh, the LULZ], Anonymizers and Anonymous Remailers, Fake Name Generators, and False Caller I.D.  Notably missing is information on social engineering.  That might have been a really helpful thing to include in a book which assumes that the public know nothing.  But alas, not there.  Not anywhere.

I was amused to find that folks who visit sites to do some "anonymous" searching or who use temporary e-mail addys are viewed as suspicious by law enforcement personnel, (pps 40-41).  Donovan and Bernier take for granted that people who use those services are visiting kiddie porn sites or generating hateful e-mails.  No mention is made of privacy denizens who view that where they go on the web is none of the business of their I.S.P. providers and perhaps are trying out the idea of obtaining a Virtual Private Network.  [Newsflash: many of the sites offering cloaking are hoping for return business as a subscriber to their VPN service].  And I've used temporary e-mail myself in order to temporarily access sites that require e-mail addys in order to sell the addys to spammers as a way to make money or wish to target me for ads based on my consumer profile ala Google Is Evil.  And there are folks who use temporary e-mail addys for reasons of safety e.g. they are being stalked by their exes.

The chapter on P2P mentions the RIAA as being the "piracy police" for audio recordings.  The authors tell us that in 1983, the RIAA began targeting college kids using P2P to share music files.  The RIAA folks log into the P2P networks and look around.  Once they locate evidence of sharing of music files, they obtain the IPs of the computer users who are involved in such activities.  If the IPs happen to be traced to university computers, the schools co-operate by [using logs of who was using the computers at the given time probably] locating the offending students and delivering the DMCA letters to them.

As of 2008, the book says, students in receipt of a DMCA letter could opt to settle out of court to the tune of $750 dollars USD per downloaded song or face court action via an RIAA lawsuit.  The authors admit to a judicial ruling that created a setback in the lawsuits still left standing at the time of the ruling.  In Atlantic vs. Howell, it was ruled that creating a file of music to share in itself is not a copyright violation.  Besides the obvious problem of downloading viruses and malware along with the coveted files, the authors say that the P2P networks can be confounding to the average legitimate user who then risks sharing more than s/he intended to.  An example is given of a hapless business employee who did just that.   
[see:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/big-victory-atlantic-v-howell-court-rejects-making for more if you are interested in the ruling].

sapphoq reviews says: All of the chapters are similar to the two that I cited in terms of sensational writing and highly biased stances.  There is nothing new to be had in "From CyberCrime Fighters: Tales from the Trenches".  If you must read this book, then borrow it from the library or read it at the bookstore [like I did for this review].  Better education can be had by reading true crime books and by visiting security sites and privacy sites on the Internet.
                                   A partial list of websites which advocate for the ability for folks to use pseudonyms and why they have chosen to do so will be included in my next post.