Carceral Nation

You are your cellphone and the New York Police Department knows your phone identifies you better than a fingerprint or an identity card because you can be marked and tracked throughout your life in real time and the breadcrumbs of your history in movement and communication can be recorded, saved, and used against you for future prosecution -- and it may not be legal.

The media have trained us to fear Anthrax even though it is a naturally occurring substance found in the soil of any working farm.  Militarized Anthrax is not the natural Anthrax you find on a farm.  Anthrax that has been militarized means that is has been "ground up" into the tiniest possible spore form for easy transmission in the air via the wind for inhalation into the lungs.  Once Anthrax gets inside your body, your chances of survival are not very good.  Militarized Anthrax is a silent killer that takes a bit of time to develop in the body as a cause of death, so marking the time and point of infection is more difficult, and that makes Militarized Anthrax an effective, invisible, assassin.  Anthrax, and its natural danger to humans, is all around us all the time.

Tom Casady is currently the Chief of Police for Lincoln, Nebraska.  As a child of Lincoln, I enjoy reading his fantastic blog called, "The Chief's Corner."  I was recently alarmed when I read an article written by Tom that rehashed the offensive/silly/inappropriate email usernames people use to inquire about employment with the Lincoln Police Department.  I was shocked to see the email usernames of applicants revealed in public on Tom's blog because that is in the least a violation of privacy for those making an inquiry, and perhaps, even a more serious ethical violation of a vested public city official.  I was unable to find the recent article that shocked me, but doing a search on Tom's site led me to a dead link for this page written on December 2, 2008 where Tom Casady revealed live email usernames of the inquirers -- figuring our the entire email address is not that hard and often doing a Google search on a unique username alone can reveal a lot.  I have blurred the email addresses contained in that article:

You are sitting with a female friend, enjoying a cup of tea and talking about the musical styling of Duffy and the peculiar nature of coated guitar strings and how people could come to use them over normal cutting edge strings. Your friend then tells you that she wants to tell you something very important and stands up, walks around the table, and sidles up next to you.

There's a notion floating about the internets that the only place we are truly honest with ourselves is found in what we type in a search box.

Rats have a rough life in the Big Apple. They are feared, even hated. In many subway stations there are signs warning people to be careful because rat poison has been sprayed in the area. A few months ago, I walked into a subway station and watched a rat that must have been about three quarters of a foot long just walk around as though he owned the place -- with no problem. That was not the case last Friday, when people in Penn Station proved that even though we have passed the time of the gladiators, the mentality has not left us.

The killing of Wendy Hile in the Bethany area in the Northeast part of Lincoln, Nebraska in 1974 was an event that marred and scarred everyone in that tiny, tight-night, neighborhood.  Tenth grader Wendy Hile -- and her high school Junior murderer, Mark Goldsberry -- lived within a few blocks of each other and the rest of us.