Risk of Shortcuts

Part One: Misgivings

One week after the 2016 national election, I wrote an article titled Trust, Surveillance, and the New Guy. I expressed misgivings about the president-elect.

Regarding trust and surveillance and the new guy, I take my cue from the New Yorkers I know professionally and personally. Hard workers. Not particularly sensitive. Most of them competitive, opportunistic capitalists. Most succeeded without the benefit of daddy money.

They do not forget that he misrepresented on 911. They remember he said he lost “hundreds of friends.” They also remember that no one saw him at a 911 memorial service. They remember him claiming to make large personal contributions to not-for-profit groups that provided aid to survivors, rescue workers, and families of cops and firemen who died trying to save others. They also remember that the IRS has no record of a donation [thesmokinggun.com]. They remember him promoting, on TV, a bogus rumor that thousands of people, “mostly Arabs,” were seen cheering the twin towers’ collapse from New Jersey [politifact.com]. They don’t forgive trolling 911 to pit Americans against Americans. They set the trust level on the new guy to zero long ago.

We could not know how far below zero the trust level would fall.

There are some things you can’t take away from the man-child, even if you despise him. He is a technological innovator who has masterfully co-opted social media platforms to his purpose. He is a true disruptor. He’s the business driver making Internet giant Facebook and sub-giant Twitter accountable for moderating their platforms. Because of the president’s firehose of inaccuracies and lies, social media companies are banning hate groups and hate speech, and debunking conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns in real-time. He is also a survivor, a fierce campaigner, a competitor with at least 24 unfair advantages over opponents, critics, and detractors — one for every hour of the day.

• doesn’t feel guilt
• doesn’t feel shame
• doesn’t have to be credible
• doesn’t have to be believable
• doesn’t have to follow plans
• doesn’t have to make plans
• doesn’t have to listen
• doesn’t have to admit mistakes
• doesn’t have to apologize
• unburdened by irony
• unencumbered by truth
• can’t be wrong
• can’t be accountable
• can’t empathize
• can’t sympathize
• isn’t sincere
• isn’t trustworthy
• allowed to be xenophobic
• allowed to be misogynistic
• allowed to be spiteful
• allowed to be hateful
• doesn’t have to pay taxes
• doesn’t have to wear a mask

To be snarky, the world’s greatest entitled snowflake.

But consider this: In an Internet-driven world, negative traits generate attention and popularity, and the first rule of popularity is that any publicity is good publicity. It’s a formidable strategy. By eliminating credibility and shame, you become impervious to truth or consequences, and you can prevail … for a time.

And yet, these dubious advantages never make for Good Leader. They can only make for Bad Leader.

No executives, no employees, no Board of Directors, no shareholders, no investors, would support a CEO who makes transactional decisions in the moment based on conjecture, rejects science, rejects data, and denounces and threatens subject matter experts who disagree.

OK, to be snarky again, CEOs with precisely these characteristics exist, but only if they are also white, male, affluent, and connected.

No reasonable person wants a leader who substitutes opinions for knowledge, selectively accepts truth, denies responsibility for his own failure while taking responsibility for other people’s success, constantly changes course, and craves personal popularity and attention above all else.

This is someone you would wish on your competitor, or your worst enemy. These are suicidal strategies to decrease productivity, efficiency, safety, reputation, revenue, market share, competitiveness, opportunity, company morale, employee retention, shareholder value, and the big one — survival. No sane person believes otherwise.

Still and all, as a country we believed otherwise in 2016. And tomorrow, November 3, 2020, 40 percent or more of those casting a vote will vote to repeat the mistake.

Part Two: Buyer’s Remorse

My colleagues — security pros, risk experts, data privacy and compliance gurus — have been steadfastly polite, reluctant to criticize.

We shrug a lot. We shrugged in May when John Ratcliffe, a political supporter with feeble qualifications for the role, was appointed Director of National Intelligence. We shrugged in August when Chad Wolf, a man with no meaningful experience in national security and counter-terrorism, was appointed Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. We shrugged in September when Dr. Scott Atlas, a man not versed in the study of infectious disease, became the president’s lead adviser on the Coronavirus task force. We shrugged each time Bill Barr, the lead attorney in the land, acted as the president’s personal attorney, instead of acting as the people’s attorney, which is his real day job.

Security, risk, and compliance professionals have been shrugging for four years, ignoring these unchecked risks that have a macroscopic impact on our relatively microscopic worlds. As if our profession exists in a polite, protected bubble, firewalled from the larger national reality. My friends, we either posers, or hypocrites, or both.

We would not be silent if the Chief Marketing Officer was actively trading company secrets with a competitor. And yet the chiefest officer in the land, and his advisers, have willingly or unwittingly become Russian assets. The irony of an American president held in thrall by our primary adversary, someone who consorts with dictators while shunning democratic allies, seems to escape us.

We would not be silent if the Chief Product Officer ignored customer data analytics and business market intelligence in developing the product roadmap. Yet we endure a president who rejects verified intelligence of foreign interference in national elections and substitutes it with disinformation about mail-in balloting and debunked rumors about political opponents.

We would not be silent if the CISO refused to respond to a ransomware infection that compromised production systems, interrupted operations, and resulted in a breach of sensitive employee or customer data. Yet we tolerate an uncoordinated, inept response to a national pandemic.

We’ve stayed on the sidelines for four years, hoping it couldn’t get any worse. How naive we’ve been.

Part Three: Hastings Cutoff

I’m reading Daniel James Brown’s book The Indifferent Stars Above, which recounts, in painstaking detail, the desperate journey of the Donner Party, an ill-fated association of families and individuals who emigrated in 1846 from Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri to California by wagon, horseback, and foot. Their misery and suffering were the result of poor planning and wretched decision-making compounded by bad luck.

By far their worst decision was the Hastings Cutoff, aka The Road No One Should Have Taken.

Some who successfully made the trip to settle in Oregon and California published guides for greenhorns so they would know what to expect. One of those books, published in 1845, was promoter Lansford Hastings’s “The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California”. One obscure sentence in Hastings’s book alluded to a cutoff that might cut over 200 miles off the trip. This was bound to appeal to families nearing the end of a 2,000 mile trek. What Hastings didn’t mention is that he’d never taken the cutoff the whole way. It went right through the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains instead of around them to the north. [source: DeLyn Martineau]

While the proven trail went northwest to Oregon and then down into California, the Hastings Cutoff crossed the Wasatch Mountains in eastern Utah, then the Great Salt Lake desert, before embarking on a long and unnecessary U-turn in the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada. After the Donner Party’s struggles, the Hastings Cutoff was abandoned. It has become synonymous with an untrusted route.

As a result of taking their supposed shortcut, it was mid-October when the Donner Party straggled into the basin that is modern-day Reno. They couldn’t know that those who stayed on the known route had already arrived in California. They still had to climb the Sierra Nevada.

When the company reached Donner Lake (then known as Truckee Lake), at the base of 7,000-foot Donner Pass, they were met with dark clouds and snow. It must have been incredibly disappointing.

The party made an attempt to scale the summit as a unit — men, women, children, wagons, and cattle together. The snow was too deep. It was too cold. They were forced to retreat to the lake. Eight more days of snow followed. Other courageous attempts to cross the summit were made, but the company’s fate had been sealed. They were trapped in the Sierras at the place where, as locals will tell you, the snow falls heaviest, and without adequate food or shelter.

It snowed relentlessly all that winter. The families that constituted the Donner Party dug in, in separate encampments, disgusted with each other, with no hope of rescue until the Spring.

The 2016 presidential election was our Road No One Should Have Taken, our Hastings Cutoff.

The parallels are plain, the most poignant being that many people died unnecessarily. The names of the 46 members of the Donner Party who perished are listed on an historical marker at Donner State Park, along with the names of the 37 survivors. We also know the names of the 200,000+ Americans for whom COVID didn’t “just go away.” For them, and their loved ones, COVID never just goes away.

But for an uncoordinated national response and too many people listening to bad information from the promoter-in-chief, somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of the dead would still be with us [National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University]. Whatever the number, it represents a massive failure of leadership.

Another parallel is the overwhelming feeling of remorse, the sickening knowledge that we didn’t have to go this way, that we shouldn’t have listened to bad advice.

The Donner Party allowed one man in their company — the wealthiest among them, James Reed — to make an irreversible decision based on a rumor. Reed met with Lansford Hastings and believed in his claim of a shortcut. The rest of the company followed along. What they didn’t know was that Hastings, like a certain reality show personality, was marketing himself as something other than he was.

As Brooks’ narrative history reveals, Hastings wasn’t honest or trustworthy. He was a promoter encouraging pioneer families to emigrate to Sacramento instead of Oregon for his personal gain. Hastings had only his own best interests in mind. His shortcut was unproven, based on hopeful speculation, not knowledge. He had not traveled the entire route. He was winging it. The cutoff was a ruse, a dead end.

In November of 2016, an entire country also fell for a con, and paid the price. The consequences have been avoidable deaths, avoidable debt, loss of standing in the world, weakened national security, critical infrastructure in peril, and the onset of an enduring economic recession.

If only we’d tempered our wishful thinking, verified our sources, and ascertained our risks. Choosing the wrong road in 2016 has resulted in four years of political polarization and ideological stalemate, a body politic of resentful, isolated camps dug in for a cold winter.

Part Four: Second Chance

I’m not telling anyone how to vote, only that no one should feel obligated to re-elect a bad leader.

Put the politics and issues aside and look at tomorrow pragmatically, as an opportunity to avoid siding with someone facing indictments for tax fraud, bank fraud, insurance fraud, election fraud, and abuse of office for personal profit. The wheels of justice have moved, inexorably, towards prosecution of criminal charges. This won’t end well for the current man in charge, and he’ll take more people down with him.

The reservoir of damning evidence from investigations of the president’s activities, his business deals, and his co-conspirators, can’t be unaccumulated. Appeals to prevent release of tax returns and business records have been exhausted. The protections of executive privilege are about to expire. The jurisdictions of the District Attorney of Manhattan and the New York Attorney General are closing in, along with other states and cities, and along with myriad personal lawsuits.

I understand but don’t respect that some will go down with this ship, with this captain, including my mom, Helen. A dyed-in-the-wool Midwestern Republican with an unblemished record of always voting the party ticket, she has a simplistic, us-vs-them approach to politics. There are Democrats who also view politics and elections as team sport, who come what may stick with their team for life.

Yet Helen’s husband of 60 years, Chuck, also a staunch traditional Republican, would choose to sit this one out were he still alive (he passed away in 2015). I’m certain he would’ve done his best to convince mom to do the same.

Chuck had a low tolerance for Democrats, took any opportunity to mock them to his children, and would definitely have voted for the Republican candidate in 2016. He would have taken that flier just to spite the Dems. Yet I’m certain that Dad wouldn’t fall for the con twice.

He served many terms as councilman in my hometown of Stow, Ohio in the 80s and 90s. He usually won re-election, because he understood that there’s a time for partisanship and a time to put team politics aside and work together to fix problems. His wasn’t the Art of the Deal, his was the Art of the Compromise in the service of the public good. He took his oath of office to heart. He recoiled from phonies and rarely suffered fools.

When I drifted off course, he would remind me of “the man in the mirror.” Character and personal responsibility matter, he’d say. People matter more than things, more than ambition.

If he were alive today, dad wouldn’t misread this moment. He wouldn’t mistake a failed businessman and tax cheat for a fiscal conservative. He wouldn’t mistake a narcissist braggart for a man of the people. He wouldn’t mistake a divider for a Christian.

He’d be irritated by a decision maker who doesn’t listen. He’d recognize a cult of personality masquerading as a presidency. He’d bristle at the fawning cronies and craven sycophants feeding at the trough of unchecked corruption.

A military veteran, along with all five of his brothers, he’d be cynical about anyone who avoided serving in Vietnam because of bone spurs. He’d remember that his role model, his father, came to this country as an immigrant, an outsider without connections or privilege.

A staunch conservative aligned to Lincoln and Reagan, he wouldn’t look the other way out of political politeness. He’d see a fatuous blowhard with an entourage of turd polishers, fame-whores, gold-diggers, shills, and grifters. He’d see a fatuous bloviator who governs by pronouncement, edict, insult, tweet, and frivolous lawsuit — and loses 93% of those lawsuits. He’d see a cult of personality with an ideology of contradictions submerged in a bog of nonsense.

We often discussed what differentiates a good from a bad leader. A good leader succeeds when he helps other people succeed, not the other way around. Good leaders lead by example, learn more from failure than from success, and speak against what’s wrong even if their voice is alone.

My dad worked for and around many bad leaders. He knew a lot about the havoc they cause. He’d recognize a desperate liar who’s run out of headfakes and distractions.

My dad was a pragmatist and I know for certain he wouldn’t want to have to justify voting for a hollow nobody. That’s why he’d cast no vote this time around, and convince my mom to do the same.

Epilogue: Morning

Imagine when this scourge, this stain upon the nation’s soul, is removed.

It will be like when the psychotic person yelling on the subway exits the train, like when the loud and cringy drunk at the bar is cut off by the bartender and sent packing, like when the obnoxious neighbor next door and his shiftless family move out, permanently.

Poof! “Like a miracle, it’s gone.”

The disturbing reality show — and its gassy bile of boasts, bluster, and blame — is cancelled. No more seasons, no more episodes. No statues erected to commemorate the failures, facades, and fictions. No library commemorating the undelivered plans, absent policies, and broken promises of a churl who couldn’t be bothered to read his daily intelligence briefings, or the Constitution.

This time the wagons roll past The Road No One Should Have Taken. A second consecutive debacle is avoided. The route ahead is long and rough in places, but known to be passable.