We have all been spending a lot of time at home, and judging from the amount of notes in the email string, we are spending too much time in cyberspace.

I am not going to launch into another satyric account of our current national disorganization. It is fun to watch and quite spectacular. Since I am unlikely to survive much of this new future, I can view it with interest instead of panic. There was a time when some of the things the government is doing under emergency declaration would have been worth discussion lasting a couple legislative cycles. Now, they just happen by decree. One of my favorites is something called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation, or AFFH. It is derived from a provision in the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

In its collective wisdom, Congress directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development by law to take action to “ensure that neither the agency itself, nor the cities, counties, states and public housing agencies it funds, discriminate in their programs.”

Fair enough. The interpretation of the Act over the last fifty years has evolved into some things quite extraordinary, and one in particular would seem to be worth public discussion and debate. In recent years, HUD increased oversight of fair housing compliance, and took steps to give them “better tools to ensure they are connecting all of their residents to opportunity, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, family status or disability.”

Here is the deal: “On July 16, 2015, HUD issued a new regulation to implement the affirmatively furthering fair housing requirements. With this rule, HUD is providing its program participants (states, counties, municipalities and public housing agencies) with more effective means to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act.”

Again, fair enough. But there has been an interesting aspect to the increased oversight. HUD now wants to specify diversity by decree, and has stated things like local zoning in the suburbs are under its jurisdiction. Like, no single family zoning. And mandates allowing large high-density buildings to be planted in the mist of previously zoned single-family neighborhoods. Thinking about this applied nationally, it is a huge initiative. The new regulation was announced without much fanfare and was recently withdrawn by the current Administration.

There is no doubt it will be back, if the proper candidates are elected in 99 days. Things like this are interesting to former suburban residents like me, who plunked down a premium to get away from urban issues, and funded decent schools and local cvic amenities.

This is not a diatribe about that. There are much more spectacular Government-issued decrees at the moment, as you know. I was reminded of that this week when something strange appeared on my screen while logging into my mail account. This is humiliating but true. I still have an AOL account which I use for normal communications and have forgotten my passwords to gmail, Yahoo and whatever sites I have bounced around. It seems pleasantly old fashioned, and a bit of a salute to a time when everything was not crazy.

I tried to think back to my first immersion in email in the early 1980s. It was AOL, of course, which was (believe it or not) considered a little edgy and forward leaning. That passed over decades, of course, but even today I find it easier to use and according to a last glance, has 52,000 notes I have sent or received. Searchable, I presume, though I rarely look.

Anyhow, this probably isn’t going to happen until next year, depending on the results of the election. That wasn’t what caught my attention the other day. When I logged on to my ancient email account, this was displayed:

I glanced at it, and then stopped to think what it was. I checked. It looked like it was actually from my friends at AOL, doddering though they might be, and not a note from an external source seeking information. It also struck me as odd that I was being informed that my own government- or “Government Actors” might want to be searching the archives on a large but mostly personal set of files.

Why AOL, and why me? There was a time I was one of those actors. This joins a long list of issues I do not understand, though find concerning. It is life in plague times. If I have now allowed Actors to join me on my email account, I think I should be alarmed. Is it reconnaissance? A scammer trying to gain access to key strokes leading to bank accounts?

We know that our friends at Fort Meade have a broad charter to examine all sorts of things. I guess that includes me, but there are a lot of Actors, and I have no answer to what seems to be an ongoing effort.

I don’t know what to think of it. But I suppose the key element is that this is just part of life in Plague Times.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
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