OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Our credit requires
careful ongoing
management
D
ata breaches like the one reported by credit-reporting
company Equifax are a great calamity of modern life.
The ancient Egyptians had swarms of locusts; we have
plagues of identity thieves and computer hackers. Nowadays we
aren’t totally at the whim of nature or some capricious higher
power, but we do have to actively protect our own interests.
In the case of Equifax, the breach lasted from mid-May
through July. The hackers accessed people’s names, Social
Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances,
driver’s license numbers. They also stole credit-card numbers
for about 209,000 people and dispute documents with personal
identifying information for about 182,000 people, according to
the Federal Trade Commission. You can visit www.equifaxsecu-
rity2017.com for more information and to perform a basic check
on whether your data is known to have been compromised. Also
see tinyurl.com/FTC-Equifax-FAQ.
This was, of course, far from the first time a company or
agency has lost control of private confidential information.
Yahoo, Target and others have been in the news when electronic
burglars have blown holes in internet security and made off with
information that can be used to set up fraudulent credit cards,
empty bank accounts, divert tax refunds and commit other forms
of theft.
It bears remembering that companies on the receiving end of
computer hacks are victims themselves, incurring great costs and
loss of trust.
At the same time, however, these companies bear compari-
son to a bank that didn’t employ good enough security guards
or a strong enough vault for our money. After all the breaches of
recent years, it is angering and dispiriting to learn a company set
up to make money by policing the credit of individual Americans
itself became the instrument that could allow criminals to wreck
our credit. Lawsuits will inevitably arrive at a fuller understand-
ing of how this happened and whether it should have been possi-
ble to avoid it. In technical legal terms, a major question will be
whether companies owe consumers a fiduciary duty to fully safe-
guard our information. Most of us would argue they do.
In the meantime, we clearly must all become more active par-
ticipants in protecting our own financial interests. Just as every
responsible parent cautions young-adult children to guard debit
and credit cards as if they were actual cash, we all must treat our
credit lines and financial facts in the same way — like cash that
can be stolen if we aren’t vigilant.
Having credit that some criminal can wreck is a decidedly
modern “first-world problem” — in other words, a nuisance
we’re highly privileged to possess. Even half a century ago in
America, such easy access to credit was unheard of. And in much
of the world, it still doesn’t exist. In essence, most of us have a
nearly forgotten slush fund of hypothetical money floating around
for thieves to grab when we aren’t watching.
We each should treat the Equifax incident as a spur to revamp
management of our credit assets. The Washington Post offers
some concise advice (tinyurl.com/Credit-Freeze-Post) on how to
freeze (and unfreeze) your credit in such a way as to keep others
from tapping it.
Other necessary steps include becoming more knowledgeable
about passwords and the security questions financial institutions
commonly use to establish people are who they say they are. For
example, a genealogy blogger (tinyurl.com/Security-Question-
Blog) has described how publicly accessible online family trees
can provide scammers with many answers to commonly asked
security questions, such as your mother’s maiden name.
Responding to all this is a hassle, one that most of us assumed
we didn’t need to deal with. But we obviously can’t trust private
corporations — or possibly even public agencies — to treat our
private information as cautiously as they should. Congress and
state lawmakers should hold corporate feet to the fire to make
rights, responsibilities and penalties completely clear. And each of
us must acknowledge and act upon the knowledge that our credit
requires careful ongoing management.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Firefighters check on Kelly McClenthen, who returned to check on the damage to her flooded home, in
the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in Bonita Springs, Fla., on Monday.
Conspiracies, corruption and climate
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
A
fter the devastation wreaked
by Harvey on Houston —
devastation that was right in
line with meteorol-
ogists’ predictions
— you might have
expected everyone
to take heed when
the same experts
warned about the
danger posed by
Hurricane Irma. But you would
have been wrong.
Last week, Rush Limbaugh
accused weather scientists of
inventing Irma’s threat for political
and financial reasons: “There is
a desire to advance this climate
change agenda, and hurricanes are
one of the fastest and best ways
to do it,” he declared, adding that
“fear and panic” help sell batteries,
bottled water, and TV advertising.
He evacuated his Palm Beach
mansion soon afterward.
In a way, we should be grateful
to Limbaugh for at least raising
the subject of climate change and
its relationship to hurricanes, if
only because it’s a topic the Trump
administration is trying desperately
to avoid. For example, Scott Pruitt,
the pollution- and polluter-friendly
head of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, says that now is
not the time to bring up the subject
— that doing so is “insensitive” to
the people of Florida. Needless to
say, for people like Pruitt there will
never be a good time to talk about
climate.
So what should we learn from
Limbaugh’s outburst? Well, he’s
a terrible person — but we knew
that already. The important point
is that he’s not an outlier. True,
there weren’t many other influen-
tial people specifically rejecting
warnings about Irma, but denying
science while attacking scientists
as politically motivated and venal
is standard operating procedure on
the American right. When Donald
Trump declared climate change a
“hoax,” he was just being an ordi-
nary Republican.
And thanks to Trump’s electoral
victory, know-nothing, anti-science
conservatives are now running
the U.S. government. When you
read news analyses claiming that
Trump’s deal with Democrats to
keep the government running for
a few months has somehow made
him a moderate independent,
remember that it’s not just Pruitt:
Almost every senior figure in the
Trump administration dealing with
the environment or energy is both
an establishment Republican and
a denier of climate change and of
scientific evidence in general.
And almost all climate change
denial involves Limbaugh-type
conspiracy theorizing.
There is, after all, an over-
whelming scientific consensus that
human activities are warming the
planet. When conservative politi-
cians and pundits challenge that
consensus, they do so not on the
basis of careful consideration of
the evidence — come on, who are
we kidding? — but by impugning
the motives of thousands of scien-
tists around the world. All of these
scientists, they insist, motivated
by peer pressure and financial
rewards, are falsifying data and
suppressing contrary views.
This is crazy talk. But it’s
utterly mainstream on the modern
right, among pundits — even anti-
Trump pundits — and politicians
alike.
Why are U.S. conservatives so
willing to disbelieve science and
buy into tinfoil-hat conspiracy
theories about scientists? Part of
the answer is that they’re engaged
in projection: That’s the way things
work in their world.
Some disillusioned Republicans
like to talk about a golden age of
conservative thought, somewhere
in the past. That golden age never
existed; still, there was a time
when some conservative intellec-
tuals had interesting, independent
ideas. But those days are long past:
Today’s right-wing intellectual uni-
verse, such as it is, is dominated by
hired guns who are essentially pro-
pagandists rather than researchers.
And right-wing politicians
harass and persecute actual
researchers whose conclusions they
don’t like — an effort that has been
vastly empowered now that Trump
is in power. The Trump adminis-
tration is disorganized on many
fronts, but it is systematically purg-
ing climate science and climate
scientists wherever it can.
So as I said, when people like
Limbaugh imagine that liberals are
engaged in a conspiracy to promote
false ideas about climate and
suppress the truth, it makes sense
to them partly because that’s what
their friends do.
But it also makes sense to them
because conservatives have grown
increasingly hostile to science in
general. Surveys show a steady
decline in conservatives’ trust in
science since the 1970s, which is
clearly politically motivated —
it’s not as if science has stopped
working.
It’s true that scientists have
returned the favor, losing trust in
conservatives: More than 80 per-
cent of them now lean Democratic.
But how can you expect scientists
to support a party whose presiden-
tial candidates won’t even concede
that the theory of evolution is
right?
The bottom line is that we
are now ruled by people who are
completely alienated not just from
the scientific community, but from
the scientific idea — the notion
that objective assessment of evi-
dence is the way to understand the
world. And this willful ignorance is
deeply frightening. Indeed, it may
end up destroying civilization.
LETTERS WELCOME
AP Photo/Mike Stewart
Equifax said it has made changes to address customer complaints
since it disclosed last week that it exposed vital data on about 143
million Americans.
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