Passwords, Airports and Risk

The super-passwords thing is getting a little crazy.  12 characters, one capital, one lower case, one number, but not more than 4 numbers in a row, one character, but not a @ or a ! - all to secure my access to a website about basketball?

It’s the same as the TSA having you take your shoes off at the airport.  George Carlin called it the largest industry in the United States: the manufacture, packaging and distribution of bullshit.

The stronger and stronger passwords aren’t going to save us from having our personal information become known to undesirables.  It’s systematically bringing a butter knife to a gun fight.  If stronger passwords actually worked, then why do they need to keep getting “stronger”?  On top of that, the reality is that as we’ve found out with recent revelations from Apple and Facebook, the people setting the password requirements often times ARE the very undesirables from whom we’re trying to protect ourselves by having the password in the first place!

The entire purpose for the stronger and stronger passwords and the more and more expensive TSA equipment is to provide the illusion of security.   We spent billions of dollars on specialized security in computers and yet financial and personal accounts are still pried open by undesirables.  We now have an entire insurance industry to answer that specific risk and a huge portion of the information technology industry is dedicated to that risk.

When it comes to the airports, we spent billions of dollars on specialized monitoring devices and yet, we still need to take our shoes off and buy tiny packages of under arm deodorant.  If these machines were as awesome as their cost would imply, why can’t they tell the difference between a pair of Chuck Taylors and a freaking bomb?  I can, and I’m an idiot.  And why, after I pass through the machine, do I still need to be frisked to discover that the wadded up napkin in my pocket is, in fact, not a threat to national security?  If a normal sized package of under arm deodorant is going to be our downfall, I’m thinking we might already have fallen.

We permit our lives to be disrupted and our costs to soar for the primary purpose of watching the rich get richer by selling us an illusion of security.  Security is a huge industry and we don’t even know we’re paying for it – its buried in the price of the ticket, or the lower interest rate on our savings accounts (remember those?) or the removal of other government services designed to enrich our lives.

I am going to try to figure out how to abandon my desire for security, but I suspect it won’t be easy, or even possible.