[conspire] (forw) [Felton LUG] The Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Meanwhile, I stumbled on this Ted Talk on YouTube about a future
> without secretes.   Around 4:00 he talks about taking a photo of a
> person, using FB to name the person ... and then using more public
> info to display the name, DOB and SSN of the person on a cellphone. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pqhMO3ZSY

It's a good talk.  I notice he glosses over the troublesome question of
how he programmatically determines a (living) stranger's Social Security
number without hiring a private detective to use unethical back-channel
contacts to do so.  I frankly doubt that part of his talk.

One of the points he makes in passing (by implication) is that most
people carelessly breach their own privacy continually, including by
what information about themselves they gush onto the public Internet.
Personally, starting many decades ago, I started not only erring on the
side of reticence but also seeding out a modest amount of deliberately 
misleading information about myself.  

One source of inspiration for my doing the latter was Patrick McGoohan's 
iconic 1967 ITV programme 'The Prisoner', where he plays a British
secret agent kept in a whimsical-looking seaside town with pervasive
surveillance to pry certain secrets out of him.  In episode 11, 'It's
Your Funeral', he and other ex-secret agents are mentioned to
have a pastime of monkeywrenching the town administration through
'jamming', revealing to the surveillance deliberately wrong but
tantalising information to send them on wild goose-chases.  To quote the
Wikipedia article:

  This episode refers to "jamming" and "jammers", i.e. constant hoax
  attempts to keep the authorities busy. The Situationist International
  referred to some of its activities as being like "radio jamming" in
  1968, the year after the episode was aired. Negativland claims to have
  invented the phrase "culture/cultural jamming" in 1984 to describe
  billboard alteration. "It's your Funeral" is perhaps one of the earliest
  uses of the term jamming in a political context.

It's about time for a 'The Prisoner' re-watch.  Wildly creative,
maddeningly non-straightforward, sometimes hilariously off-target (e.g.,
the episode about the computer), occasionally very prophetic -- and with
some 1960s feet-of-clay aspects, e.g., more than a whiff of misogyny
that also afflicted other iconic British series such as 'The Avengers'.