No joke! Now you have the ability to buy someone else’s phone records. According to this article that appeared today in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

I am not in law enforcement or a privacy expert; I know I have a problem with this. My phone calls are my own business, and they should not be available to others! At this point everyone is focusing on the possible threat to undercover law enforcement agents and how criminals could use this information to expose them in a potentially life threatening manner, and I understand that concern.

However, this also affects normal everyday people as well. With this information “employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist — or a competing company.” How long before it becomes a normal part of the hiring process? This could lead to an entirely new form of discrimination in the hiring process, with employers not hiring people because they have made contact with a competing company, or perhaps because they don’t like the trend of the person ordering to much take out food or something else.

“According to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use… this problem is all too common [and], federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime.”

This is one piece of legislation that I hope gets approved [depending on the wording and the full extent of what it covers].

Hold on, it’s not what you think. Evidently a new calendar has been released in Germany depicting scenes from the Bible, but not the kind you would expect…they are erotic scenes!

“A German Protestant youth group” has put together a 2006 calendar that “feature a bare-breasted Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and a nude Eve offering an apple.”

Nuremberg pastor Bernd Grasser said: “It’s just wonderful when teenagers commit themselves with their hair and their skin to the bible.”

“There’s a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,” said Stefan Wiest, 32, who took the racy photographs.

Anne Rohmer, 21, wearing garters and stockings, posed on a doorstep as the prostitute Rahab.

“We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people,” she told news agency Reuters.

Apparently the calendar is only available in Germany…that’s too bad as I still need a calendar for 2006. 😉