I confess to two Facebook breaches: I made one comment
mentioning our presence in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, just a day into our vacation,
followed up a week later with a more vague yet telling mention that we were
waiting at a Blackball Ferry loading dock in Washington state.
I also made one post concerning my ongoing ability to
attract crazy homeless ladies, though I did not mention the city in which that
occurred (Vancouver, BC).
So I could call my indiscretions minor, but enough for the
casual thief to surmise that I was not home at the moment, leaving our house
ripe for the plucking.
As far as the US government goes, we gave them a lot more
information – right down to a PDF of our planned itinerary, which my wife
emailed to me at work. Whether or not any of it was read is likely not in
question, though the potential certainly was there, given the NSA-related revelations
of earlier this week.
Who officially knew we were gone?
Three people in our immediate neighborhood, whom I told.
Our automobile insurance company. I called them to ask
whether we needed any special insurance while traveling in Canada.
Our credit union. We let them know where we’d be going in
vague terms so when charges started showing up on our credit card, we wouldn’t
be flagged as having a stolen card.
Various relatives, some of whom tended our dog while we were
gone, and who stayed at our house for a time, and one other who came over to
ensure things got watered properly.
Two full classes of students at Brigham Young
University-Idaho. I teach them. I let them know we’d be on the road so they
wouldn’t try to call me at work.
So, yeah, the whole world had to know our business.
But let’s not forget the electronic footprint, which is
enormous.
Credit card receipts and bank transactions will be the most
telling for any NSA folks looking in to what we did. We also crossed the
US/Canadian border, though at this point I’m not sure if any electronic records
were taken – or if indeed any records were taken at all; in neither case did
the border agents have our paperwork long enough to do any recording, though
I’m sure there’s video evidence, complete with our license plate number,
recorded for posterity.
We also sent emails. Me, mostly to my students. My wife, to
her relatives keeping an eye on the place. Were any of them read? Don’t know.
(That’s the worst part of this NSA thing; we can only trust that they’re not
reading things. Yet.)
A few cell phone calls – we’re not big callers, but there
were some made. And across an international border. Surely they were recorded.
We came home to find all well here. But we came home not
really knowing who knew we’d left.
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