Another day, another “scandal”. Sigh…

Who done what? What did Hillary do? What did Ivanka do? Were their “crimes” equal? What is a server anyway? I mean, I know what a server is (sorta) but how many of the Orange Baboon’s “base” or whatever it is know what a blasted server is?

Guess what? I am NOT saying we should lock Ivanka (or Hillary) up. I don’t think we should lock ANYBODY up for what I strongly believe are deficiencies in the average person’s understanding of the security issues surrounding email and computer use in general and a lack of clearly defined requirements and communications for proper use by the organizations they work for.

If you are one of my nine readers, you might remember that I work for the online banking industry. Lemme tell you, we are Light Years ahead of the US federal government when it comes to computer security issues. (You are happy about that.) Even though I am a designer and therefore have absolutely NO ACCESS to anything resembling client/customer data, my work laptop is TOTALLY LOCKED DOWN. I cannot connect to public wifi at all (thank you zeus for the iPhone hotspot, it saved my life on that LSD trip to Fla). I cannot access anything remotely related to social media except for the company facebook facsimile. Email? I can’t say I have never emailed someone at work from my personal address. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a well-defined rule about that. But when I am using my work laptop, I use my work email to communicate with people about work stuff. The point being that I am trained (over and over) to do that.

I once found an article about “her emails” discussing the sometimes extreme difficulties federal government employees can face in using the technology we (taxpayers) provide to them, which is spotty at best. And yes, that includes the Secretary of State. I never understood why “her emails” (Hillary’s) were such a big deal. She is a baby boomer (an older one than I am) and I am gonna guess she is pretty savvy about navigating the basics of email and web-surfing but doesn’t have a clue about internet security issues. I’m not sure if we want our elected officials to spend a lot of time learning the intricacies of internet security. That isn’t their job. And even I don’t know that much about internet security. My company pays a lot of people (well) to take care of security issues and communicate policies to its employees (like meeee).

I give Ivanka a bit less leeway on this issue because she is a member of the Millennial Generation. She was born three years before my first-born (I looked up her bio today). We had a computer in our house by that time. I don’t know what the Trumps did but certainly by the time Ivanka was in middle or high school, she was using a computer to do at least some of her homework. Hillary was definitely doing her high school homework the same way I did mine, writing it out longhand on lined notebook paper. But still, Ivanka is probably not an expert on computer security issues and why should she have to be to do her “job” (or whatever being a pretty face next to her father’s fugly mug is called). What was she thinking? Maybe something like, “Daddy will take care of this” or maybe she really doesn’t understand how this looks to the teeming mass of American citizens who voted (or didn’t) for “Daddy”. Ugh ugh ugh.

Where I get off the train with all of this is that the Orange Baboon spent his whole “presidential” campaign riling his “base” up about Hillary’s horrible “crime” of keeping a server in her basement. If I were Ivanka, who well knew her father’s campaign strategies, I would definitely make sure I was carefully separating my personal email from my “work” email. But I am not Ivanka. I am far from perfect but I grew up in a family that was honest almost to a fault so I do not understand all of this stupid crapola. I guess that’s why we don’t have political aspirations in my fam.

Sorry to be polly-tickle again but Jeebus!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2018 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.