Exceive

I am happy about the elections, but it is a happiness akin to what I would feel about my wife buying me a Ferrari for Christmas using our joint credit card. And I have yet to look under the hood to see whether the engine is internal combustion or hamster wheel.

Remember, they had elections when Saddam was in power, too.

By the way, where’s Osama? Cool as elections in Iraq are, Osama in a jail cell would be even cooler.

I used the Warning Label Generator to make this.

Sometimes you get an email claiming to be from some organization - a bank or eBay, for example - asking you for some information to clear up a problem that you supposedly have or are about to have. The email is from a scammer, not the organization in question. If you give the information, it will be used for fraud.

This is called “phishing”.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lost of them like the following, claiming to be from the CIA or FBI.

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

++++ phone: (703) 482-0623
++++ 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time

Some cute things here.

1) This came to my work email address. At work, I share an IP address with a whole bunch of people. I’m sure that the computer people at the CIA are aware that this is an extremely common situation. That IP address could be anybody at the office. If I were accessing illegal web sites (I’m not, that would be incredibly stupid - Internet cafes and libraries don’t fire you) that could be traced very easily by the network administrator, and that’s who the real CIA would probably contact first.

2) “Office of Public Affairs”. I can think of exactly two parts of the CIA where I wouldn’t worry about them contacting me. The other one is “accounts payable”. The Office of Public Affairs is the office that distributes press releases and answers routine questions from the general public that have non-confidential answers.

No, I didn’t open the file that came with this. For one thing, the office anti-virus software deleted it.

I get somewhere between 1 and 5 of these per day. About half of them say FBI instead of CIA.

So, what do you do if you get one of these?
First, don’t panic. The real authorities don’t do business this way. In fact, there is a notice about this right in the middle of the CIA home page.
Do NOT open the file. It is almost certainly either something bad or a link to something bad.
If you are worried that this might be from the real authorities and you want to be sure to avoid trouble, look them up in the phone book or on the web and call a local office or pick up the phone and say “president bush abu musabi airplane”. You also might contact them to find out if they would like you to forward the email to them to try to track down the scammers, but they probably have plenty of copies already.

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Oscar Wilde

Don’t eat the bread with the weird fungus on it.