Word: phoning
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Unfortunately it's too late to legislate that no one should be allowed a cell phone until he or she is at least 18 and fully licensed to use it. Every parent understands that handing over the car keys marks a fateful passage, so much more freedom and possibility, so much more risk and temptation. But cell phones took us by surprise: so small, so innocent, so powerful in the hands of a bored or twisted teen who now has an extremely efficient tool for wasting time, cheating on tests, organizing fights, bullying classmates, phoning in bomb threats, arranging drug...
...that vanishes as you get up close. The research suggests that even as they get more electronically immodest, they are delaying actual sex, having fewer partners and generally behaving more responsibly than many of their parents did. By all means, come down hard on the kid who uses a phone to cheat or bully or harass or cause harm. But when it comes to baring all, remind them that even if they escape the law they'll never erase the trail, when they decide to apply for college or a job or run for President: indiscretion lives forever, their naked...
...early last September you'd parked outside Lehman Brothers' Manhattan headquarters with a cell-phone scanner and listened only to some of the "chatter" coming out of Lehman's front office, you almost certainly would have realized that Lehman was going under. But to understand the wider consequences, how capitalism was about to do a somersault into the watery abyss, you would have needed to understand how Lehman fit into the global financial system. (Of course, listening to cell-phone conversations with a scanner in this country is flatly illegal. And you need a sophisticated decrypting device to listen...
...There's also the problem that almost anyone who reads the news today knows that any phone conversation can be monitored, by the U.S. or another competent intelligence service. An operative recently back from Iraq tells me that Kurdish political leaders systematically script telephone conversations among themselves in order to mislead the Americans, Iranians and Turks, who the Kurds know are listening to their phone calls. Since transcripts of these calls carry the weight of scripture in Washington, we risk being led into another intelligence failure in Iraq. For that matter, how do we know that al-Qaeda in Pakistan...
...what the locals were saying - random conversations at dinners, on trains, at the post office. It all amounted to little more than impressions, the locals' hopes and frustrations. Not exactly hard intelligence, but it put the analysts into the swim of a particular country, allowing them to put the phone chatter and hard intelligence into context...