The Muddled Male

Shhh, They May Be Listening

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

         One of the most irritating habits of 21^st Century humans has to be the tendency to talk loudly on a mobile phone while sitting or standing in an anonymous crowd of people.  More often than not it is an old duffer like me who grew up in the era of hand crank phones with party lines and subconsciously assumes that others on the party line are already listening in anyway so he might as well talk loud enough for the neighbors to hear.  Besides, with these newfangled cell phones there is just a little dinky hole in the bottom of the phone to pick up your voice, so it must be necessary to talk loud just to force the words through that small orifice.

            And then came Edward Snowden who told the world that the National Security Agency was listening to my phone calls and recording all my emails.  With that piece of news the hard-of-hearing old timers like me began to think that since everyone is listening in anyway, we might as well talk loud enough so that we can at least hear what we are saying.  Yesterday I noticed that the cases of David Leon Riley, a suspected gang member, and Brima Wurie, a suspected drug dealer, are being reviewed by the Supreme Court to determine whether or not police should be allowed to search a defendant’s smart phone for clues after stopping him or her because they are a suspect in a crime.  Not only do they want authorization to take the phone, they want to be able to search it without benefit of a warrant.  Those representing the police argue that your cellphone is available to be searched just like anything else you are found to be carrying when arrested.  Not so fast, said the American Civil Liberties Union, Your smart phone is like your home and should require a warrant based on probable cause.  Your smart phone, say many, carries most of your history and all of your life, and that would be tantamount to being forced to testify against yourself.

            Actually I wasn’t worried about any of that since I am pretty law abiding, but now I have a real concern.  A couple of weeks ago Ann, my wife, and I went with her niece and her niece’s husband to test drive a new car.  During the sales pitch the salesman asked if any of us had an iPhone so that he could demonstrate a neat feature available in this brand new Ford Escape.  Well, since I always carry my iPhone close to my heart, everyone turned and looked at me, and before I knew it the salesman had the control center in the car linked to the phone in my pocket.  When I looked I saw my name on the control center screen and the radio was playing music from my selection of jazz, country, and the Tabernacle Choir.  But what really worries me is that two weeks later my wife’s niece wanted to drive that same Ford Escape again, so we went with her and her husband to the dealership and waited in their truck in the street while they negotiated with the salesman about another test drive. 

            While Ann and I waited, my phone rang and it was my friend the professor who wanted to chat.  When I noticed that Ann’s niece was in the test car and had started it to drive away, I moved from their truck to the back seat of the car she was testing only to see my name on the car’s control center and the professor and my conversation being broadcast over the car radio. The Ford Escape we had driven two weeks previous had recognized my phone while I was sitting in the truck in the street and linked itself into our conversation.

            Luckily the professor and I had been chatting about something mundane, like the theory of random numbers, and hadn’t said anything incriminating.  But now I am afraid that there is a red Ford Escape out there, somewhere, that recognizes me and can hook into my telephone calls anytime we happen to be driving through the same area.  Worse yet, if it hears me talking to somebody about that sexy looking Lamborghini I have always wanted, the red Ford Escape will probably contact it’s friend the Ford F-150 Sheriff’s truck and have me hauled in for being unfaithful.  Ann says that I am just a paranoid old goat, but how would you like to be stocked by a vehicle who was angry over the fact that it was still sitting in the lot, unsold.  To be safe, I have stopped using my phone to take compromising selfies.