Hello stranger! I’m tweeting nearby your house. Come attack me!

Keeping privacy is something I learned to control instinctively, thanks to years of wars and the former police state where I lived that forced me to understand how to protect myself from interferers.

Our digital age has become a little bit difficult to control with the dozens of social networks available nowadays, which I’m kind of obsessed with. However, I’m reconsidering all of that. I have no longer become the private person I used to be, and I need to put an end to that.

On my iPhone I have an app called “Echofon” which I use to read the latest tweets tweeted by the people I’m following on Twitter. It’s a really cool app, that is very intuitive, fast and easy to use, unlike the extremely-slow twitterberry app that I had on the BlackBerry I had before I switched to the iPhone.

While “Echofon” is really good, it recently added a new feature that became available after I installed the latest update of the app. It offers the “Nearby Tweets” feature which allows the Twitter iPhone user to basically see whoever is tweeting nearby his/her place. This is not it. The feature depends on the iPhone’s GPS technology, allowing the user to locate the tweeting people on Google maps, identifying their exact location accompanied by the Tweeting person’s twitter page, photo, Web site link and the entire timeline of his/her tweets. See the screenshot posted in this entry.

As I noticed this, I have become so disturbed. I actually can walk to the tweeting person’s house and recognize him/her through his/her photo posted on their Twitter page. What disturbed me the most is that there are psychos in this country who can basically hurt you if they disagree with what you say or tweet, to be specific. So through this app, I can easily be attacked and even if I’m not attacked I don’t have my privacy anymore.

I don’t want some people to know where I live. Period!

This is not the first time I come across a privacy breach. Last month when Google announced its Buzz social media network, I woke up to see that I’m following literally every Gmail person in my contacts list. That was not the worst part. Thank goodness millions of people complained that the flawed Buzz system was ruining their privacy that it finally changed.

In Iraq, Google Earth made me nervous all the time. Insurgents, known for their use of technology, were able to locate basically anything they wanted through that satellite service.

Today, it’s not only the redundant and repetitive Google Buzz but also Linkedin (which I totally find useless), Foursquare (which I see as a place where people go to get coupons because some weirdo tells them they became the kings or Queens of their neighborhoods), FMyLife, Jaiku, Plurk, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Yammer, Qaiku, Geni.com, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Skyrock, Qzone, Vkontakte, RenRen, Kaixin, ASmallWorld, studivz, Xing, RunAlong.se, Bebo, BigTent, Elgg, Hyves, Flirtomatic, etc… The list is too long for me to count.

All of these are too much. I find most of them useless, except for Facebook which I consider the most “private” amongst them. At least I know I can control who sees my content and even what content they can see!

You might have heard this before. Technology is making our life better but it’s also hurting us. I strongly believe we should stop for a minute before we tweet or facebook our content because this may put us or/and the others in danger.

Visiting the Prez's House

In two successive days I had great things to witness. Yesterday, I voted in my country's major parliamentary elections, and today my friends and I had the chance to take a tour at the White House!

What great experiences, vote for my country on one day and visit the house that supports democracy the next day!

For more pictures, visit my flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bassamsebti/.

Where is My Money?!

My mouth fell open in shock when I heard the tax preparer telling me that I will have to pay around $6,000 total taxes. The shock left me speechless and almost paralyzed for two days, as if I was literally hit by a bus.

Paying taxes is not something new to me. I have been doing that ever since I set my feet in America. This time I was just not expecting to pay as much.

I calculated how much money I have and how much I can save before the payment deadline which is on April 15. I found out that I actually can pay the whole thing before the deadline but I will have to basically cut back on tons of stuff, including social activities so that I can at least pay rent, bills and groceries.

So I basically sucked it up and thought I’m not the only one in this country who pays taxes. However, something really plucked my nerves recently. It’s how the Washington DC city municipality responded (or not) to cleaning up what two successive blizzards left. I felt like Stewie Griffin in Family Guy when he yelled at Brian the dog asking him, “Where is my money?”

Indeed, WHERE IS MY MONEY?

Almost a week after the blizzard is over, many streets are still icy and dangerous. There are mounts of snow almost everywhere, making it impossible sometimes to run to catch the bus. Trash is unbelievably piling up in some of the fanciest neighborhoods in the city, like in this picture I took this morning at the bus stop. The buses are not running on regular schedule. It takes me between an hour and a half and two hours sometimes to get to work.

I was so annoyed about this that I wrote my facebook status like this yesterday: “Bassam Sebti is wondering where all the thousands of dollars he pays for taxes are going when seeing the streets of the American capital a total mess. Mounts of snow, icy sidewalks and no trash pick-up. Where are we? Northern Afghanistan?"

The funniest and the perfect response for that came from a friend of mine who wrote, “No, you're in DC...but the money is going to Afghanistan.”

I couldn’t agree more!

Global Warming Irony

I took this picture yesterday while going to H&R Block to file my taxes. I found it really interesting and ironic at the same time.

The snow has accumulated on the sidewalks in Washington DC after two blizzards hit the city, paralyzing it for an entire week. Despite these crazy blizzards, I still believe Global Warming is happening, because it's something based on facts.

Going Green or Being Mean?

Ever since I came to the United States in 2006 I have been hearing about the whole ‘going green’ thing. TV, radio, internet, grad school and even my landlord back in the Philly house where I once lived have been constantly obsessed with recycling and going green.

At first, I thought what's all this fuss about? The country is rich enough to produce whatever it wants. Naively, I was comparing it to how we had to recycle everything during the 12-year international sanctions that were imposed after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then, we had to recycle plastic products and paper in order to have the government reproduce them because we were not allowed to purchase raw materials for the factories.

It didn’t take me too long to understand that the main reason for this obsession is ‘saving Earth.’

Recently, the Washington D.C. City Council unanimously voted in favor of a 5-cent tax on both paper and plastic bags that took effect on January 1st of this year, causing a lot of confusion and anger among the D.C. public who find it extremely weird to pay for plastic bags.

A few days ago, I was sick with a stomach virus and it was unbelievably hard for me to battle the snow and the freezing weather in order to get some chicken soup, which I totally hate and does not eat unless I’m sick. Worrying about wearing some warm clothes and what I should drink or eat to recover, it didn’t occur to me that I should carry my grocery bags until I reached the supermarket. Damn it, I said, now I have to buy these stupid bags. I thought for a second and two to see if it’s worth it to go back home and get the bags in this freezing weather. Finally, I decided to buy the plastic bags.

I felt frustrated, I have to admit, not because of the 10 cents I paid for two bags but because the going green thing has become too extreme. I thought about the whole “don’t be mean, go green” slogan and realized that it should be “don’t be mean to force me go green!!!”

Don’t get me wrong. Going green is something very important, I believe, but the way it is carried out might not be the right one to start with. Going green in the US will never save the world by saving some stupid already recycled plastic bags alone. I think there are bigger issues that need to end such as the use of bombs which causes an unbelievable damage to earth and to the breathing air. Do you know that war zones are covered with heavy grey smoke clouds? We need to start saving earth by ending terrorism and wars that cause huge fires and damage to everything where they happen. I have never seen an environmentalist calling for ending those causes of damage. All I see is people talking about paper and plastic products, ignoring the damage that is caused by a bomb coming out of a military tank or caused by a suicide terrorist attack.