Yep. We are being watched.

Got a ticket in Georgia headed to Orlando last week cop came outta nowhere he said his partner was on bridge above clocking people so beware of overpasses

I have seen them on Martin Road over Memorial Parkway busting people heading North out of the construction zone.

if you used Waze you would have been warned about a half mile prior.

A buddy at work told me he now has an Alexa dot in his car. I think those things are just asking for trouble. Snooping devices for sure.

My wife and I were watching a "pseudo-reality" show the other night on TV (not a major network, and I can't imagine it being a heavily viewed program) and some of the folks on the show were from Wichita Falls, Tx. I am not a big Texas geography guru, and never heard of it, so after a few minutes, I tell my wife as I pick up my smart phone that I'd like to find out exactly where that is in TX.

I proceed to Google, and begin typing it in, and got to 'W-i-c-h-i-t'..... and below the pop ups begin to happen, and the first one under what I'm typing in is... you guessed it... Wichita Falls, TX.

Again, this is kinda an obscure show on a WAY less than major network. Now how do you suppose that my smart phone knew that's what I was looking for. Not Wichita State University, not Wichita Kansas, or a whole host of other things that begin with Wichita. I am a conspiracy theorist by nature, but what we are carrying around with us and talking and texting into and cruising around on the internet has to be spying on us every second of every day.

I am a conspiracy theorist by nature, but what we are carrying around with us and talking and texting into and cruising around on the internet has to be spying on us every second of every day.

Michael Chertoff, former director of U.S. Homeland Security, has a new book called "Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age."

This is the description on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Data-Reclaiming-Security-Digital/dp/0802127932

I take book reviews like anything, with a grain of salt, but this is the gist of it. He's basically saying a lot of our existing laws and such are outdated, we're moving faster digitally than can be kept up by lawmakers (some of whom probably don't want changes, and the pervasive attitudes (mostly with the younger and liberal folks) about social, "checking in" everywhere you go and telling everyone, and giving up our personal information willingly along with other factors and things going on, eventually will bite us hard.

I'm not concerned with a physical invasion anymore. We'll have problems eventually with more theft of personal data and money, breakdowns of the infrastructure grids (power, transportation, water, etc.) and other cyber-related attacks.

If I were a hacker or cyber-thief, I'd go for soft targets like state agencies people wouldn't think about needing or making uber-secure. Conservation departments would be among the first I'd hit to steal personal data like driver's license and SS numbers, addresses, various age ranges and genders. Easy peasy.

I believe our government is way behind in recognizing and protecting our country from cyber attack.

If you're a deer hunter you don't go out trying to kill the Hanson buck on your first hunt. If you're a new coach at the rock-bottom worst college football team in the country you don't beg to play Alabama as your first game.

If you're trying to eventually cripple the U.S., you don't go after the biggest infrastructure targets at first. You wouldn't, probably, try to hack the NYC traffic lights or London rail system. Or the electrical grid for the northeast. You wouldn't try to hack into Harvard or Stanford or Texas to try to steal student financial info.

You'd start smaller - ignored state agencies with people who think like it's 1994, smaller cities (probably just for fun) with people who want it to be Mayberry again, cities in trouble (Detroit, Baltimore) - to gauge reactions, see what happens, see how they fix things or if they do. Soft targets. People in charge who are ignorant about the threats and unwilling to adapt preventatively. The plans and attack(s) would be an evolutionary cat-and-mouse hacker chess game requiring patience until the bigger payoff somewhere down the line.

This stuff goes on already, though. We just don't know about it to any great extent unless there's a really serious screw-up that is revealed publicly, like the breaches into big company systems in the last year or so.

If I were a hacker or cyber-thief, I'd go for soft targets like state agencies people wouldn't think about needing or making uber-secure. Conservation departments would be among the first I'd hit to steal personal data like driver's license and SS numbers, addresses, various age ranges and genders. Easy peasy.