This call is in confidence....right?

Why...

Do people believe anything indiscreet they commit to an electronic device will not come back to haunt them? The only way you can be sure some witticism, rant or personal video you have sent into the electronic ether will never be disseminated is: kill the recipient blow up every server in existence. As this might prove a bit tricky, you’d think the alternative of only whispering things in confidence into someone’s ear (so long as they don’t have a hearing aid that records) is as obvious as a Donna Versace face lift. And yet........ Privacy started to leave planet earth with President Nixon. He was brought down by recordings in the White House that played back some remarks that ultimately cost him his job. The irony is it was Tricky Dicky himself that started recording in the Oval Office so that Presidents remarks could be recorded for posterity. Doh! Hilary Clinton’s biggest mistake (apart from believing Bill when he promised her for the umpteenth time that was his last peccadillo) was not what she wrote in her emails... it’s that she was dumb enough to write them at all. Sarah Palin was furious when a stash of her emails were leaked with details of a possible ‘mix’ between business and politics… yet her password on such sensitive material was her birthday! If half the rumors about Jack Kennedy are true, there is no way he could have kept a lid on things in today’s world of email message trails and camera phones.  Indeed a recent survey showed that a smartphone is the number one hand held device... relegating what men keep in their underpants to second place.  

...and another thing

Every week I read about some Titan of Industry, Politician or Media Darling caught with their electronic pants down.

From an Exec at Smith Kline Beecham sending out a response to the heart attack risks from their Diabetes drug Avandia:

“This data should not see the light of day,”

to last week’s farcical racist comment by UKIP leader’s paramour that:

“Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family”

to the delightfully insightful Hollywood faux pas provided thanks to Kim Jong Il. They were revealed after the splendid hacking at Sony whilst The Hermit Kingdom was trying to prevent the release of The Interview.

My favorite in fact was not the spat about Angelina Jolie’s Cleopatra project being described in an email by Producer Scott Rudin as:

“An $180m ego bath… and I’m not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoilt brat…”

but that Sony kept all the password log-in details in a file called… you guessed it ‘Passwords’.

...and another thing

Sex!!!! You’re remotely famous and record industrial scale rumpy-pumpy while dressed as a nun and doing a few lines of coke off a dwarf’s shaved head… and think it will never get uploaded??? People that stupid can be given a brainwash in a bidet.

However, I will finish today with a leak story that still makes me laugh. At a Group 20 summit in Paris in 2011, Chinese delegates (spies) were offering senior officials some hot nude pictures of the then French President’s wife Carla Bruni. A whole bunch of them took the bait and asked for the attachment… They all promptly downloaded malware onto their phone or computer.

And that’s why our grandkids will all speak Chinese!

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