Wisconsin –-(Ammoland.com)- Readers who have just finished Franklin Horton’s latest book Random Acts, have advised the author the first thing they did was check their social media accounts.
For those of you who are fans of the apocalyptic genre of Mr. Horton’s other books, Random Acts is a stand-alone creation of fiction about cyber crime and terrorism. His story line will make you think two or three times before you post some of your personal information on a social media web site.
Random Acts By Franklin Horton
The book Random Acts is about people using computers to meet their goals in life. Communication goals they cannot accomplish in face-to-face contact. This is done by some of the book’s characters when they are not trying to harm anyone or demonstrate their ability to bring evil to others.
Then there are the characters in the story who are in fact using social media to live out their unreal life’s fantasies and characters who are using the computer contacts to commit destructive acts of terrorism.
Personally, I only have one social media account and I have only a few pictures on that account, no personal info. After reading Mr. Horton’s fictional story I am pretty sure I will not be opening any new types of social media accounts or adding any more info to the one I already have. Mr. Horton’s story got my attention.
There are three story lines going on in Random Acts. One is a teenage girl who has a number of social media accounts and tells the internet world all about her life. Her mother dies in the beginning of the story and our young female hero moves back home to live with her father. Because she misses her friends in the big city she continues to pour out her life online.
The second story line is about a morbidly obese male who has virtually no interactive human contact skills. He conducts his life online in a fantasy world. He has a made-up life inside a computer, that allows him to live a scenario where he is bigger, faster, smarter and a whole lot lighter than when dealing with his real daily, dull life of failure.
The third party to this equation is not a person but a group, a group of third world terrorists who want to use weak, somewhat easy to manipulate lowlifes already out there on the internet and get these cyber cretins to do the bidding of the terrorists.
Before you continue to read, I would suggest you google your own full name. I do believe you will be shocked at how much information about you and your life and your location in the world is already out there on the internet. This is not taking into account the personal information you are adding to the web with your inputs to social media.
In Mr. Horton’s story the bad guys steal the personal information and cute photos of the “sweet” girl next door types who have all their life laid out for anyone to read online. They take this data and photos and develop false social media accounts that look real “American,” wholesome, with a touch of sweet sexiness and add a smidge of vulnerability. This combination is then used to suck in the looser who lives in his mother’s basement and “evil” tries to get this waste of humanity to do the bidding of the third party terrorists.
Franklin Horton is well known for his apocalyptic genre books that I believe everyone needs to have copies of first for entertainment and then to have on hand as training manuals for a potential real world crisis. Random Acts is not part of his apocalyptic series. In many of Mr. Horton’s books the characters cross over into the next book, not in Random Acts. Kind of a shame since he did a great job of developing these characters and I, as a reader of all of Mr. Horton’s books, could see some the good-guys in Random Acts crossing into one of the later apocalyptic books.
It is a known fact that middle-east countries, that have terrorists who hate the US have targeted American military troop’s social media. They used that information to scare and threaten the family members of some soldiers. World-wide there are individuals and nation states who want to harm American service personnel.
When we finally get into that shooting war in the Pacific ocean in the near future you can bet that some Asian countries who do not like us will be using social media to track Americans and harm Americans, both in the theater of war and back home “State-side”.
Our young military does not know how to function in their professional and personal life without electronic communication. Anything you put out there electronically can be tracked and traced. The enemy is already monitoring us and trying to get inside that communications. They will go for the weakest link and that most likely will be the personal social media accounts of the young troops deployed to the forward edge of the battle area, who just want to “phone-home.”
Evil is watching you and listening to you online. This is real life. Mr. Horton has put together an entertaining story that will convince you that evil could in fact be monitoring you.
Do you feel safe–what is in your computer?
Major Van Harl USAF Ret.
About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.:Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret., a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Infantry School. A retired Colorado Ranger and currently is an Auxiliary Police Officer with the Cudahy PD in Milwaukee County, WI. His efforts now are directed at church campus safely and security training. He believes “evil hates organization.” vanharl@aol.com