Douala, Cameroon     Crossing the world to places where you feel lucky to have internet, rather than thinking it’s as common as air, I follow this hacking thing perhaps more than the average bear.

In Germany between Hamburg and Berlin, a funny thing happened to me that in my naiveté, I ignored blithely until returning to the United States. It was a situation I wrote off, jokingly, in mi companera’s words as Mercury-in-Retrograde, when mechanical things and even simple communications go awry. I would send an email in Hamburg tightening down a meeting or a pickup, and somehow it would never be received. My blog wouldn’t show up for posting in New Orleans. Finally hitting New Orleans I consulted our server mastermind, thinking, duh, it might be me, not them. Sure enough he and his team found that 87 of my emails had been blocked from so-called “blacklisted” sites. I’m still sorting it out, and working to tell people that in some cases their homes are even blacklisted, not just random buildings, coffeehouses, and hostels. They recommend that I go through a VPN network like people do in China and Russia, so that I’m linking virtually to an eye-spy server in the US with a random address and then bouncing on from there. Maybe their right. Maybe it’s the way we all need to go?

With emails being randomly hacked throughout the US now, first with tech companies and Hollywood, and now politics and most recently former General and Secretary of State Colin Powell, I read that a network anchor had stayed home to delete his entire Gmail account so that he wouldn’t be taking a chance. Others in public life are also scouring their emails. Senator Lindsey Graham told a reporter, no problem, he had never sent an email yet, so he wasn’t worried. What world does he live in, and can we move it farther from the rest of us?

The simple lesson might be, don’t say anything in private that you wouldn’t want to have made public, but who among us could ever live in that glass house forever. Even if we tried, that doesn’t protect us from misinterpretation or, you know, Mercury-in-Retrograde.

Veterans of the burn from previous hackers say that in fact you learn to be more careful. Law firms have created abbreviations that essentially say, talk to me in person, and don’t put it in an email.

None of this is a step towards more transparency and in fact it seems to be a step away from the quick and fluid communication that is part of the gift of email.

So what’s the solution? Go all German and flip IP addresses and blacklists like cards in a deck in the name of privacy, but that may mean even emails that you might want to read are being blocked from you or slow-death in a spam file. Meanwhile weeks may go by before some poor sucker, like me, realizes he’s talking to the internet, and not the people he’s trying to reach.

I’m with the “no substitute for good judgement” crew, because we have to communicate to move forward, but what a mess!