Anti-Trump Social Media Junkies Are Getting Scary Pro-Trump Robocalls

It's still unclear if this organization had anything to do with
robocalls threatening people who critcized Donald Trump
on social media. 

Gizmodo earlier this month reported on yet another dark side of social media and the internet.

Some people who are active on social media and are not Donald Trump fans have been getting weird, kind of threatening robocalls on their phones from what appears to be the pro-Trump crowd.

Nobody is quite sure if all this is a joke, a real threat, a harmless prank or just more social media bullcrap. But I have to admit it's unnerving.

Luckily, evidence is pointing toward the "harmless prank" theory, but the fact that this can be done is probably giving the evil alt right ideas even as I write this.

The robocalls warn the anti-Trumpsters to stop making "negative and derogatory posts about President Trump," said Brett Vanderbrook, who was driving for Uber when he got the call a few weeks back.

After Gizmodo first published the story, several readers said they recognized the voice in the recording as being from Ownage Pranks, a service that places automated prank calls. "Citizens for Trump" is a prank offered by the service, says Gizmodo, but the trouble is there is a real organization called "Citizens for Trump" that really are just that and active.

Gizmodo, and pretty much nobody else, is sure whether the real Citizens for Trump is behind these robocalls.

They are kind of cartoonishly scary. Here's part of the script:

A man's voice comes on. "We've been monitoring some of your posts and it does seem that you've beem making some rather negative comments about President Trump. Is that correct?"

Then there's a pause as if the voice is waiting for an answer. Then it continues: "Listen, we're going to have to ask you to lay off on the negative and derogatory posts about President Trump, OK?" Then another pause, then more: "What's your problem, anyway? Don't you want to make America great again? Well, you've been warned. We'll be keeping an eye on you. Have a nice day."

It doesn't sound like a lot of people have received this robocall, but it is chilling, even if meant as a joke.

They say Big Brother is watching you. So is obnoxious brother, apparently.

George Orwell Should Have Worried More About Business Than Government

A California woman is suing her former
employer because she said her boss
monitored her 24/7 through the
workplace management app Xora. 

Talk about an overbearing boss! And a creepy one, if a story about a lawsuit that recently appeared in Ars Technica is true. 

The woman sying, Myma Arias, was fired from her job for the money transfer service Intermex, after disabling an app called Xora from her company-issued iPhone because it traced her every move.

It could tell where her car was going, how fast she was driving, how long she was at a given location, pretty much everything.

Arias said she had no problem with the app running while she was on duty working as a sales executive for the company.

After all, it's pretty reasonable for a boss to make sure the employee is meeting with the people she's supposed to meet with, was driving safely and working,  and not just hanging out at the nail spa or something like that.

The problem Arias said she had is that her boss, John Stubits, monitored Arias and coworkers while they were not on the job.  He could spy on her 24 hours a day.

Part of her lawsuit reads as follows, says Ars Technica. "Plantiff expressed that she had no problem with the app's GPS function during work hrs but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits tht this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion."

You have to wonder why Stubits, the boss, was so interested in his employees' off work activities. Was it away to make them feel like they should be working when they are off the clock? Or is Stubits a creepy pervert who wants to know everything about his workers?

Whatever is going on, I think we should all be rebelling against this kind of corporate spying on its employees, just as we should rebel against blanket spying by the government against its own citizens.

Of course, employers have the right to fire employees whose activities on personal time are way over the line.

In Toronto recently, an engineer with a firm was fired after he enthusiastically supported, on camera, another bro who participated in a vulgar, misogynistic insult against a female television reporter, a quote, unquote joke that's gotten popular on social media.

Where I live in Vermont, a Vermont State Police trooper was forced to resign after his superiors caught wind of offensive posts he put up on Facebook.

So yes, there are circumstances where your private life, which isn't so private nowadays, can get you fired. Often justifiably so.

But where does the boss cross the line? Certainly, they shouldnt have the right to spy on your every move. Why should bossman care if you kick back with a beer while watching the game on Saturday afternoon? Or get randy with your spouse on Friday night?

I'm hoping the boss that was monitoring his employees' every move, and is the subject of that lawsuit, gets fired himself.

Big Brother Is A Marketer: Creepy Junk Mail Goes To A Dad, And His Deceased Daughter

One of the most disconcerting things about marketers, and using the Internet, and social media and everything else on line and in technology is the stuff these marketers know about you,

A mourning father, and the junk mail
addressed to him and his late daughter. Icky.  

They know everything about you. Stuff that you don't know they know about you. Stuff you might not know about yourself.

Recently, an extremely creepy window of what marketers know really freaked out and angered an Illinois dad.

Junk mail from OfficeMax was addressed to Mike Seay and his daughter who was killed in a car crash a year or so ago.

Now, people often get junk mail addressed to somebody who has passed away. They're on a mailing list or a database, and the people who run the database might not have any way of knowing the person has died.

Fine.

But, according to the Los Angeles Times, this is way creepy.  Because the junk mail was addressed, and I'm directly quoting here, "Mike Seay, Daughter Killed in Car Crash."

Seay said he is only an occasional customer of OfficeMax and would never have told anyone there such personal details of his daughter dying, and how she passed away.

OfficeMax says it gets its mailing list from a third party provider. But that third party provider seems to know a lot about Seay and his personal life. Which means that provider, and so many other marketers, know all the details of our lives, too.

In this case, it looks to me like some computers figured out the circumstances of Seay's daugther's death, and some idiot just put in a note, never intending for it to get out. But it did.

Just how the marketer found out about the death, and how it happened, is unknown to us. They're not talking. But it feels invasive to say the least, no?

I know it's just for marketing purposes, and I don't mind strangers knowing things about me, but I'd like to be the one to choose what is known about me and what isn't.

I also know that ship has sailed, and people, marketers know much about me and a lot of other people.

Another problem is some of this "knowledge" about us is incorrect. The algorithms that computers use also allow the programs, and/or people to make incorrect assumptions about us. Or there's just wrong information about us that gets thrown into the data.

Garbage in, garbage out.

A small example: The other day I blogged about a crazy Ukranian guy who hangs off of buildngs by his fingertips for fun and jollies. Suddenly, I got spam alleging that Ukranian girls were interested in meeting me and I should go to their website to find them.

Since I looked up something referencing the Ukraine, the advertisers guessed I might be interested in picking up Hot Ukrainian Women. (For the record, dear marketers who are surely reading this, I have no interest in Ukranian women)

But it gets more serious than my sad lack of a relationship with Ukranian women.  According to the L.A. Times:

"Retail giant Target reportedly knows how to use its data to identify pregnant customers, and it recently lost tens of millions of customers credit and debit card information to hackers, among other data. Gatherings of consumer data are also reportedly sellling off lists of rape victims and AIDS and HIV patients, a privacy group told Congress in December."

I routinely look up all kinds of strange things, either as fodder for my blog and other writings, or just goofy curiosity. Will this come back to haunt me. Will banks say I'm too big a risk somehow because I'm looking up financial problems that aren't my own?

My elderly father has a serious heart problem and I looked up treatment options for him. I know I can't be left uninsured for pre-existing conditions, but will insurers somehow screw me over because they think I'm the one with the heart problem, and not my dad?

I'm contemplating a blog post on police brutality and have looked up some items on that subject. Will police get ahold of this data and perhaps take action.

That's a very paranoid thought, I realize, and I doubt any police agency will look at me askance for looking up instances of police brutality.

But if criminals can steal identities through big data breaches like the one Target experienced, can more sophisticated criminals put together a data-based dossier on me or anybody else and assume my identity, or yours?

Could they then commit further crimes in your name? And get you in trouble?

The ways that data can be mined is dizzying. Many cars come equipped with GPS. People can track where you've been in your car. 

So, if I was going down the wrong street, realized it, and turned around in drug treatment center parking lot so I can get back on the road to my intended destination, where the Internet brand me as a drug addict.

I'd hate to go through life being super careful about what I look up, where I go, what I see, because it'll go on my (incorrect) permanent record.

I'm still in the realm of being paranoid here. But will this paranoia become reality some day?

People have long worried about Big Brother watching you. They were thinking about the government. Which is a possibility. But a bigger threat seems to be that Big Brother is a marketer. Or worse, a criminal.

I think I want new relatives.

Did NSA Pick The Wrong Congress Person To Fight With?

Some people love him. Some people hate him.

My guess is U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt isn't
finished with the NSA quite yet.  

But almost everyone agrees that when Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, gets into a battle, he doesn't let go.

So it will be interesting, to say the least, now that the National Security Agency has basically blown off Sanders when he asked whether the agency spied on any member of Congress.

First of all, I get it that we have to spy and gather intelligence pretty intensely on our terrorist enemies, and I understand that work can get murky, messy and shady. I accept that. Somebody's got to do the dirty work, and that's the NSA's job.

However, it does seem the NSA has gotten a bit carried away, spying on anything that moves, it seems. And what do they do with all that information anyway? They don't seem like the most trustworthy bunch in the world, after all.

The Snowden leaks seem to indicate the NSA pretty much obtained information on everybody, and probably a lot of their work was illegal.

But hey, laws, schmaws. I'm sure the James Bond wannabes at NSA are having a grand old time collecting data on boring emails and phone calls.

I'm criticizing the NSA here, so I half expect their agents to show up at my door even before I finish writing this post, so they can arrest me for daring to complain about them, or something. My computer and cell phone are probably bugged now, too.

Oh well, if the NSA wants to read my boring emails about normal winter weather in Vermont, let them.

Anyway, the latest bit of trouble for the NSA came last week, when Sanders decided to make an inquiry. According to the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, here's what Sanders asked:

"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?....Spying would include gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not available to the general public in the regular course of business?"

The good news is the NSA got back to Sanders pretty much right away. The bad news is, they didn't answer his question. Again, like or hate Sanders, you'd think a government agency would have a little more respect for a Congress person than that, just kind of blowing him off.

Here's part of the NSA's response to Sanders, according to the Free Press, which received this statement from an NSA PR person:

"NSA's authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. pesons.....Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons."

The NSA also said it is still reviewing Sanders' letter.

Well, that's surely a non-answer. Sanders didn't ask for WHICH members of Congress had been spied upon, if any. He just wanted to know whether it happened. The NSA could have protected privacy by answering Sander's question with a yes or a no, and leaving Congress people's names out of it.

So, reading between the lines, I guess the NSA's non-answer to Sanders is a yes, that they have been spying on Congress.  Some members of Congress, including Sanders, have not said kind things about the NSA, so maybe the agency is annoyed with them, and so maybe they are spying to get the dirt on them?

We may never know, but I bet Sanders will try to keep finding the answer. As I said he doesn't give up very easily.

Yeah, yeah, I know some of this is political posturing on Sanders' part.  But I love watching a good battle, and the one between Sanders and the NSA is going to be a good one, indeed.