Dowbrigade

Ames, IA — Physicist Costas Soukoulis
and his research group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory
on the Iowa State University campus are having the time of their lives
making light travel backwards at negative speeds that appear faster
than the speed of light. That, folks, is a mind-boggling 186,000 miles
per second – the speed at which electromagnetic waves can move in a
vacuum. And making light seem to move faster than that and in reverse
is what Soukoulis, who is also an ISU Distinguished Professor of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, said is "like rewriting electromagnetism."

from a Press
Release from U.S. Department of Energy’s
Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University

Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings,
which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified
intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined
in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation,
the war of ideas in the Middle East and — in her most popular post
— bad food in the CIA cafeteria.Buy This PhotoChristine Axsmith,
with her husband, Justin Benedict, says she was fired by BAE Systems
after she took a stand on the Geneva

But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries
with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won’t be joining
her ever again.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions,
her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday,
Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping
the CIA test software.

She said she apologized
right away and figured she would get reprimanded and her blog would
be eliminated. She never dreamed she would be fired. Now, Axsmith said, "I’m
scared, terrified really" of being criminally prosecuted for unauthorized
use of a government computer system, something one of the security
officers mentioned to her.

from the Washington Post

This is an increasingly sticky wicket in which many
bloggers are getting stuck – and screwed. After almost losing his own
precious job, the Dowbrigade voluntarily and of his own free will,
took a blood oath to never blog about his work, his employer, his colleagues,
o rhis students past, present or future.

And this on top of losing our second job as Webmaster
of a small media company for blogging a little known fact about a physical
disability of a certain South American dictator, which turned out to
be a leak of highly classified information which could have been traced
back to my ex-employer.

On the one hand, we feel more than justified, as we
were never told the information was classified or embargoed, the person
who divulged it to us regularly fed us juicy items to blog about, and
after all, it seems ingenious to tell a juicy secret to a blogger and
then be shocked when it appears in a blog.

On the other hand, in retrospect, not such a sharp career
move.

We wish Ms. Axsmith all the luck in the world in finding
a non-classified job.

It seems that each decade these days can
be associated with a particular kind of crime. The 80′s was rife with
muggings, in the 90′s carjacking was all the rage, and now, in the brave
new millennial decade of the aughts it is identity theft that is running
rampant across the country.

Of course, some will argue that the
signature crime of the current decade is more appropriately corporate
malfeasance,
or
illegal
immigration,
or even high crimes and misdemeanors.  And, it should ne noted,
the decade still has four years to run. But in terms of sheer numbers
(at current rates by the end of the decade over 20% of Americans will
have
been victims), identity theft is a clear favorite.

Lately, we have been not so much wondering if it will
ever happen to us as much as wondering when.  Perhaps most oddly,
rather than paranoia or trepidation (the typical Dowbrigade reaction
to threats) we find ourself almost looking forward to having our identity
stolen.

After all, what is our identity, really, and what good
had it done us?

An identity is not the same as a self. Rather, it is
the accumulation of attributes, traits, habits, preferences and idiosyncratic
behavior that allows others to identify us, and forms the immediate basis
of our superficial self-image.  However, more often than not it
is used by others not to identify us, but to stereotype us, and used
by ourself to massage our ego, deceive ourself by combing over faults,
and nurture our spoiled inner child.

Seen impartially, and speaking only for ourself, our
identity is not a particularly valuable or endearing collection of traits. One can
only assume
that
if a cyber-thief
was to steal our identity they would end up with a boatload of vanity,
unsightly egotism, attacks of idiocy, laziness, sloppy thinking and a
penchant for easy solutions. Let him have all trace of our weakness, cowardice, wimpiness, incipient sexism, supressed racism and questionable taste.

Hopefully, along with our identity, the thief would
inherit our 25-year-old guaranteed student loan, our accumulated credit
card debt, our unpaid taxes, our endless dental treatment plan payments,
our collection of parking tickets, our recently overdrawn (bank error)
checking account, our MBNA account, and the regular desperate cries for
financial salvation from our progeny.

We certainly look forward to the new owner of our identity
having to sort through the constant onslaught of retro snail mail from
credit card companies, the AARP, and most malignantly, the scorched earth
tactics of the Harvard University Alumni Fundrazing Drive.

While they are at it, the thieves are welcome to the
more material accoutrements of our identity as well: the obsolete computer,  jelly
stains on the keyboard and godknowswhat on the screen; the crappy old
car, now tumbling into the terminal phase in which it’s just
one
thing
after
another,
rust and rot and planned obsolescence eating out one part or system after
another; our creaky, cranky body, more or less in the same state; high
blood pressure, raised cholesterol, hiatal hernia, stomach saroma, failing
eyesight, fading hearing, falling follicles; the whole sorry package.

The identity thieves are also welcome to the damning
paper trail chasing us around as we wandered across the planet
this past half-century; the sealed cases, expired probations, disciplinary
hearings, defaults and foreclosures, the evictions, expulsions, deportations
and banishments from bars, educational institutions, commercial establishments
and private homes, the extensive but secret files buried in basements
at the Cambridge Police Department, FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, the Mossad,
Department of Homeland Security, ETS, PETA and who knows where else.

Take it, please! Take it all! Leave me blank, an unwritten slate,
pure potential, a tabla rasa. Let us shed our old identity like a snake
sheds a worn-out skin. Leave us floating free, egoless, anonymous. We
would still be uniquely us, we are sure. Identities, after all, are a
dime a dozen. Some people we know have several spares.

So go ahead. Take our identity, please.  You’d
be doing us a favor.