Liveblogging Some Tropical Fish

12:30 PM Dec 15, 2005

Nothing like spending a week in Hawaii -- a work junket, if you can believe that, so we'll be rooting for the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawaii's smoke-free restaurants bill in next year's legislature; but not all work by a long shot, so we'll also be rooting for surf instructor Jan's spiritual journey -- to drop you right out of blogging altogether.

And there's nothing like taking eight flights in a week to get acquainted with the idiocies of airline security.

(Tropical archipelagos are apparently also known to inhibit elegant segues.)

It's impossible for anyone who flies to endure the quotidian depredations of the airport, and "in the wake of September 11," every asinine thing is justified with reference to security.

Every journey brings a new delight; my favorite innovation from this sojourn was a chatty pilot defending that droit de siegneur, the First Class-only restroom, as necessary "to prevent people congregating at the front of the plane for security reasons."

Or X-raying the shoes, which still doesn't seem to be a de jure regulation but is a de facto one. (For that matter, is checking an ID? The government says the regulation, whatever it is, is secret. For security reasons, of course.  Just like the no-fly list.) A prime example of fetishism having nothing to do with the actual security of the plane: someone tried to put an explosive in his shoe; therefore, all shoes are to be searched for explosives. God help us all after some lunatic passes a metal detector with plastique in a bodily cavity.

Of course, there are certain practical limits to this fetishism. After 9/11, the TSA decided that since small pointy objects were used to hijack planes, small pointy objects were contraband in the skies -- notwithstanding the fact that the true security loophole exploited by the gangs was the protocol to comply with hijacker demands, a loophole that the very fact of 9/11 closed. For all the toenail clippers they've officiously confiscated, however, they'd never dare start seizing the equally dangerous ballpoint pen. But then, there's an undeniable micro-level logic to the enterprise. Nobody got the sack for September 11th, so you'd figure nobody is going to be held accountable for failing to anticipate a jihadi swallowing a condom full of C-4. On the other hand, the next time someone stands up brandishing a box-cutter, the danger to the plane will be inversely proportional to the danger to a TSA administrator's job.

In security matters, it's easy to overlook risks until after the fact and easy to become fixated on the wrong thing. Just so in nonprofits (see, this has a point after all). One that I knew insisted on extensive negotiations for a director to discuss budgetary issues with a friend and donor who was in a position to help for fear of compromising security. At the same time, it was doing no on- or off-site network backup whatsoever.

At my old job, someone kicked in the unsecured basement door after hours. Luckily, I didn't own a VCR and was sitting right there watching Being John Malkovich ... and it's only 'luckily' because confronted with the choice between fight or flight, he decided the bulky old TV wasn't worth bashing my skull.

And it's not at all uncommon for us to meet prospective clients deeply concerned with whether they can download their DIA lists for redundancy purposes [they can, of course] even though they do only sporadic backups of their house lists.

Security is one of those things that's a cost-benefit tradeoff ... you have to decide which risks you're willing to take, which you need to mitigate, and how much you're willing to spend on it. That's one of the things that makes terrorism effective, after all: apart from the theatrics, lockdown security imposes meaningful costs on economies that depend on flexibility and movement.

Most NGOs I know don't have a real disaster recovery plan, and maybe many don't truly need one: if the building burnt down, the organization would be starting from ground zero anyway. But that's not always true. And even when it is -- is that also true if your network is hacked? If your web page suffers a denial-of-service attack? If someone sues you? Can you afford to be shut down for a month or two, or are there people who'll die if you close for more than 24 hours? And are you really sure that it's something that isn't locked that's endangering your security -- as opposed to a routine behavior in the office culture that nobody thinks twice about any longer?

The answers are different for everyone ... and just asking the questions is a journey more distant, exotic and (certainly) time-consuming than the tropics, with many roads and byways along the way. If you're ready to start exploring, get your boarding pass with BoardSource's Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Guide, a free pdf; TechSoup's Disaster Recovery how-to; or try the Model IT Policies on NTEN's Technology Resources page.

And remember, as your unmentionables get rifled in front of everyone, that life's a journey, not a destination.

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