I sat down and sent out a few emails—filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. "It will just be a few minutes," one of the clerks said.
Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafés. Then I saw them coming toward me. "We're going to take you in for questioning about the emails you've been writing," they said.
What followed, in a windowless room at the main police station, felt like a bad cop movie. "Who are you really?" the bespectacled inspector wearing a khaki uniform and a smug grin asked me over and over, as if my passport, press credentials, and stacks of notes about Fiji Water weren't sufficient clues to my identity. (My iPod, he surmised tensely, was "good for transmitting information.") I asked him to call my editors, even a UN official who could vouch for me. "Shut up!" he snapped. He rifled through my bags, read my notebooks and emails. "I'd hate to see a young lady like you go into a jail full of men," he averred, smiling grimly. "You know what happened to women during the 2000 coup, don't you?"
THE INTERNET CAFÉ in the Fijian capital, Suva, was usually open all night long. ... But one day soon after I arrived, the staff told me they now had to shut down by 5 p.m. Police orders, they shrugged: The country's military junta had declared martial law a few days before, and things were a bit tense.Why don't more people use encryption? Seriously people.
I sat down and sent out a few emails—filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. "It will just be a few minutes," one of the clerks said.
Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafés. Then I saw them coming toward me. "We're going to take you in for questioning about the emails you've been writing," they said.
benzenedream: "Remember people, use https://mail.google.com, not http://mail.google.com. Or just install CustomizeGoogle in Firefox."And don't forget to *encrypt your email* which this does *not* do. It encrypts the connection from your browser to gmail's server which would have helped in this case, but doesn't protect the email on its way from gmail to its final destination.
As long as we're giving technical advice, just log into Gmail, click Settings -> General -> scroll to the very bottom and select "Always use https".
delmoi: Why don't more people use encryption? Seriously people.Maybe I just missed it, but I didn't see anything in the story that confirmed the notion that the police really could read or really had been reading her email.
At nineteen, she opened her own advertising agency, in L.A., and, in 1962, she married Hershel Sinay. The marriage didn’t last, but the agency did. In 1969, she played a small role in history when she allowed Daniel Ellsberg to use the copier at her agency.She's like a character from Mad Men or something (which I saw for the first time Sunday after realizing for the first time that it was on basic cable, not HBO)
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posted by Damn That Television at 10:52 AM on August 18, 2009 [22 favorites]