Word: eavesdrop
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...virtually all information relating to cryptography was under the control of the National Security Agency. With the rise of the PC and then the Internet, libertarian-leaning computer hackers realized how easily the government could eavesdrop on their data and how important it was to get cryptography away from the Man and into the hands of the People. Diffie's breakthrough did just that. Throughout the '80s and '90s a ragtag group of like-minded crypto fiends built on his work and distributed it over the Internet, end-running the agency and ensuring that everyday citizens could keep their...
...berating monologue, Hawke scrutinizes James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, asking, "What would he do?"-something which nicely crystallizes Hamlet's vacillation. Hamlet screaming at Gertrude to "Leave wringing of your hands" as she dives for a telephone, and placing a recording wire on Ophelia so Polonius can eavesdrop on her conversation with Hamlet are all commendable directorial choices, but the work becomes spoiled with major misinterpretation. As the play was origianlly written, Hamlet chooses not to kill Claudius in act III, scene iii, because he discovers Claudius praying and repenting in the chapel. As we see it, Claudius...
...daughter's insistence, counting the dogs in 18th and 19th century hunt scenes instead. "It wasn't what I had planned, but it was wonderful," she says. And one weathered traveler has been pleasantly surprised when her two teenagers have brought friends along on vacation: "If I eavesdrop, I can find out what's really going on in my kids' lives. Plus, they treat me a lot better when there's a witness around...
This, anyway, was the story I had heard from the time I was curious enough to eavesdrop on adult conversations. I was three years old when a white bus driver warned Rosa Parks, "Well, I'm going to have you arrested," and she replied, "You may go on and do so." As a child, I didn't understand how doing nothing had caused so much activity, but I recognized the template: David slaying the giant Goliath, or the boy who saved his village by sticking his finger in the dike. And perhaps it is precisely the lure of fairy-tale...
...heads was about the atom bomb. Our duck-and-cover drills were designed to protect us, somehow, from the Big One. Nowadays, we drill our kids on what to do if a classmate goes nuclear. It's an unlikely scenario, just as the Bomb was. But when you eavesdrop on kids these days, there's the painful possibility you'll hear them speculating on who in their class might be most likely to play Doom for real. The shootings at Columbine, Conyers and elsewhere remind us that the threats we face amid our end-of-the-century prosperity may often...