Roam At Your Own Risk

Stove Top 31: Cell phone roaming is a surveillance nightmare, claudine gay gone, homeschool bullishness

Author

Stephen Flanders
January 05, 2024

Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Enjoy.

The Roaming Problem

It’s been a while since I featured a story on privacy, so today let’s discuss how vulnerable you are to surveillance when you use data outside of your home network (i.e., in another country).

When you get that “you are now roaming” text when you’re in another country, what’s really happening is that your mobile network is connecting to the local mobile network via the IP Exchange (IPX), which is a private network that is supposed to safely facilitate international roaming. I emphasize the safe component of that, because when your phone connects to the IPX, it is transmitting data about your phone number, your mobile network, and, most importantly, your location.

You would think this information would be safeguarded, as most people wouldn’t want their location being broadcasted in real-time. Well, too bad. Surveillance companies have brought access to this data from country network operators seeking more profit. Basically, these mobile network operators are selling your data in much the same way that social media companies do, except this data contains your live location and, in some cases, even your text messages and calls.

It’s not hard to see how this could be dangerous. For example, a Mexican journalist was killed the day after his phone was geolocated. When combined with ubiquitous cameras and AI, we’re moving toward a future where the government knows where you are every minute of every day.

Unfortunately, considering how hard it is to get people to fight back against obvious privacy threats, it’s going to be almost impossible to get them to fight back against something as obscure as international roaming.

Implications Of Claudine Gay’s Ouster

Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard, a victim of testimony that I think defends free speech but is nonetheless contradictory when you consider the history of “elite” educational institutions, over 50 accusations of plagiarism, and…racism?

Clickers will see that the claims of racism come from Ibram Kendi, the face of the anti-racist movement. Basically, he claims that a white person would never have lost their job for something so trivial as plagiarism. That’s obviously not true. I promise if I plagiarized 50 times at Haverford, I wouldn’t have come close to sniffing a degree. The president of Stanford, a white man, was forced out because he manipulated data in his research. The president of Penn, a white woman, didn’t even plagiarize anything (that we know of). What killed her was simply giving the same testimony that Gay gave.

It’s pretty easy to see why the Kendi’s of the world is going this way: it’s the only thing they can think of to get themselves out of having to admit that the obsession about diversity led Harvard to hire an unqualified plagiarizer. If Harvard, a place synonymous with excellence, can be tricked into such malpractice, then anywhere can. This makes it easy for critics to say that DEI will result in the destruction of competence across society. That’s an existential threat to the radical diversity movement. Hence, racism.

Besides the charges of racism, the other interesting thing about Gay’s ouster is that it marks a potential turning point in the culture war, which has historically been dominated by the left. As explained by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, the right was able to force Gay out by applying reputational, financial, and political pressure. Basically, they disliked Gay and Harvard, so they painted her and Harvard as incompetent with the plagiarism accusations, got billionaires like Ackman to threaten to withhold donations, and won a political battle with her testimony on antisemitism.

If Rufo has his way, this will become the go-to conservative war strategy. I don’t really see how this doesn’t devolve into the nonsense we’re seeing with the balloting process, but whatever. As Rufo explains it, the right sees this as a war between truth and ideology. While the left sees it as a struggle between democracy and fascism. How we escape this war without badly fracturing the country is anybody’s guess.

Homeschooling Might Be The Future

As this fracturing gets worse, I expect homeschooling to become increasingly popular. If you’re a conservative in a liberal school district, you’re not going to want to send the kid to a place you perceive as an indoctrination center. Ditto for liberal parents in a conservative school district. Couple that with the fact that many public schools are basically incompetent and private schools are exorbitantly expensive, and yeah, I think we’re going to see a lot more homeschooling.

You’re already seeing this play out. There are now 3.1 million homeschooled students in the US, up from 2.5 million before the pandemic. 5 million or more homeschooled students is well within reach.

The question then becomes whether that is good or bad for the country. Or, put another way, are kids losing anything by being homeschooled? At first glance, it doesn’t appear so:

  • Homeschooled kids typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public school students on standardized academic achievement tests. That number rises to 23 to 42 for black students.

  • They also typically score above average on the SAT and ACT.

  • This boost in performance comes regardless of the parents’ level of education or income.

  • Educating a kid at home only costs ~$600/year, versus $16,446/year in public schools. That’s nationwide savings of $51B.

So homeschooled kids do better in school, save the country money, and are probably happier not having to sit in dumbass class for 8 hours a day.

Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Extras

Until next time, ✌️

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