the tindog coffeehouse

Robert Mueller may run the FBI, but evidently Mrs. Mueller runs the house. After the FBI Director nearly fell for a phishing scam, his wife banned him from banking online.

“Just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam,” Mueller “barely caught himself in time” and admitted he “definitely should have known better.”

He said he changed his passwords and tried to pass the incident off to his wife as a “teachable moment,” but she was having none of it and told him, “It is our money. No more Internet banking for you!”

Keep in mind this is the head of the friggin’ FBI we’re talking about here. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the Bureau, does it?

No word on whether Mr. Mueller got to keep his MySpace page.

Yes, I know I’m getting a little preachy here, but hear me out.

There were a couple of related stories that were published recently that I think are important to mention. One was an AP story about free speech on the Internet and how companies such as Yahoo and Google sometimes impose arbitrary limitations on that freedom. The other was a story on Ars Technica about the recent amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an amendment that not only grants telcos immunity for aiding in government wiretapping, but also gives the federal government much broader eavesdropping powers, allowing them to wiretap at will with almost no judicial oversight.

We’re at a point in history where our desire for certain freedoms and civil liberties and our use of the Internet for the exponential flood of information are often at odds with one another. We want to be freely connected to the world, yet even online, there are limits to those freedoms.

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Let me first preface this by saying I don’t have a Facebook profile, nor do I have a MySpace page, nor am I on Twitter. Or any other social network for that matter. I understand the idea behind them and see the potential value in them for some people, but for me personally, no.

Recently there’s been a lot of controversy floating around about Facebook’s Beacon system. Essentially, it works like this. You have a Facebook account and shop online at a company who is participating in the Beacon system, such as Overstock.com or eBay. Regardless of whether you’re logged into Facebook at the time, if you buy something from one of these companies, all of your Facebook friends are automatically notified of what you bought. Huh? Yeah.

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