Security and Class
MSNBC has a neat article entitled Double Standards in Security Hassles:
If you want to know why America’s security is so heavy on busywork and inconvenience and light on practicality, consider this: The people who make the rules don’t have to live with them. Public officials, some law enforcement officers and those who can afford expensive hobbies are often able to pull rank.
Class warfare isn’t new. But in this form it is dangerous. By paying attention to the wrong things – grandma at the airport – we are ignoring the right things – identifying the most dangerous people. By training an army of low-paid workers to harass us all at airports by taking away our cologne, we aren’t doing the right things – hiring, training and rewarding an elite force of employees specially equipped to keep those who would hurt us off our airplanes and away from our bridges and tunnels.
Important things to think about. Remember, the 9/11 hijackers all flew first class…
I know what you’re saying. “This is an information security blog, what is he doing talking about security at the airport for?” I think the same type of thing tends to apply in information security as well. Does the CEO of the big multinational corporation use a smartcard to read his encrypted email? Or, does his assistant handle the hassles of decrypting and verifying for him? Does the system administrator have to abide by the same password rules ad you and I, or can they just set their account to “password never expires”? Class matters in all things related to security.