Nothing But Trouble, so they don’t come back

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician’s documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

I wonder if it has much to do with the USAF being a relatively new service with a proportional cultural impact, coming into being as a service in 1947. Up until then, combat aviation was subordinate to the Army and Navy. This would point to a preponderance of Army/Navy WWII vets among the show’s consultants and audience.

Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.