The words that
travelers fear ... “Your card has been declined.” New technology has made travel altogether different - better
and worse. Gone are the Traveler’s
Checks and visits to an AmEx travel center for a stack of letters. But WiFi, passwords and PINs are
accompanied by virus, hacks and phishing. A brave new world that even the we meek
can’t avoid.
When Estonia
escaped the clutches of the Soviets, they looked at the huge bronze Lenin
statue in the main square and decided it had to go. The photos of a cable noosed around the father of the
revolution, did not go over well in Russia. A Soviet war memorial was removed, and soon Estonia’s fledgling paperless government computer/internet/phone system was attacked, hacked and crashed - a
cyber assault on the 2nd most literate country on Earth.
Within a few
years, Estonia became the world’s leader in cyber security, and is now the most
web-based country around. Cash is
nearly extinct, snail-mail is.
All government documents, votes cast, prescriptions, bills, records -
and damn near everything else is done on smart phones. Internet access is guaranteed in the Constitution. Skype
and Hotmail ... invented here.
But I am on an
old-school overseas per-minute landline phone. Someone has tested my VISA number on a $1.75 charge to some
glassware company in Ohio. My bank
(USAA - “Best bank in the country” - Money Magazine) sent me a text to verify
the strange charge. Because I
don’t live in my cell phone like an Estonian, I didn’t. So they froze the card. So, if you get an email from a Russian
website asking you to bail us out ... it might be for real.
- Syber Stew
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