It’s hard to believe sometimes, but I began writing this column — in print back then — during the Reagan Administration. It was 1987 and the crisis du jour was called Iran-Contra, remember it? Colonel Oliver North got a radio career out of breaking federal law. The FBI director back then was William Sessions, generally called Judge Sessions because he had been a federal judge. I interviewed Sessions in 1990 about the possibility that American citizens might have their privacy rights violated by an upcoming electronic surveillance law. “What would keep an FBI agent from tapping his girlfriend’s telephone?” I asked, since it would shortly be possible to do so from the agent’s desk.
“It would never […]
A lot of online behavior is habitual. My e-mail client is Eudora, for example — an orphaned program that hasn’t been updated since 2006. People keep telling me to switch to this or that but I like Eudora and have 17 years of mail stored in it, though I sense an end coming there. I also use Orbitz, primarily, for my travel planning. And it isn’t that Orbitz is particularly better (though not particularly worse since I use Kayak from time to time to compare) but that it holds already in its digital innards a whole succession of my credit cards as well as my five frequent flier numbers. Or it did. 