Leaked TSA Security Memo
The recent events on flight 253 have us all thinking about airline security. I think Bruce Schneier, as usual, has said it best:
For years I’ve been saying this:
Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.
This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.
EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.
Bruce is referring, of course, to the new, rumored security procedures said to be rumbling their way out of the TSA’s nightmare bureaucracy and onto your next airline flight.
In a nutshell: planes must disable their seat-back in-flight entertainment, passengers can’t use electronics, get up or access their bags during the last part of a flight. Oh, and you can’t have anything in your lap.
Keep in mind, this is in response to a dim-witted “terrorist” who snuck a weak explosive onto a plane… inside of his pants.
Remember when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up his Reeboks? That resulted in a limit of one carry on bag per passenger, despite the fact that Reid’s plan had nothing to do with carry on bags. Then there’s the whole liquid limit for carry on bags, which also makes no sense given the simple reality that liquid re-combines very easily, even if you do happen to carry it aboard in small containers instead of big ones.
So the recent rumors of new policy, while wildly stupid, are just stupid enough. They carry enough non sequitur authenticity to be utterly believable. I was ready to believe them. Then a source contacted me. He’s inside the TSA and was desperate to leak the internal memo that brought the new rules into existence. Now it all makes sense: the non sequiturs, the absurdity, the utterly incomprehensible creation, amendment and abandonment of these policies.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that in a few places, it would seem the TSA exercised forbearance when it seemed like, even by their standards, they’d crossed the line. Here’s the document, reproduced without further comment:
Career Advice: Penelope Trunk is a Charlatan
(Or: Physician, heal thyself)
Let’s start with this: I’m an idiot. I’m 24 years old and I don’t know anywhere near as much as I need to. I convince myself otherwise because without the strength of thinking I know at least something, I could never get much done.
That said, I do know this: there are only a few people who you should take advice from. I mean life advice: advice on how to be who you are, how to manage your world, how to grow as a person.
- People who have demonstrated an interest in your success and years of loyalty. You’ll be lucky if you get one of these. I hit the lottery, and I have two. You’ll know them with this test: If they asked you to drop everything and save their ass (business, product, family, life) for a month, you’d do it without hesitation.
- Your significant other. This is someone who spends a lot of time with you and sees all that you struggle with, all that makes you happy. You’ve been through good and bad and get wistful recalling both. My luck continues: my girlfriend is the wisest counselor I could ever ask for.
- Yourself: If you cut the crap and take a long walk alone, you can ask yourself anything and usually get the right answer. Make the time to know your own thoughts: you might be surprised how much is waiting in your own brain.
That’s all. Here are people who should not be trusted for advice:
- Some dick with a blog (even me). If you’ve ever read a top-ten post on a blog, you know the content is cranked out to drive pageviews. The author probably slapped the content together in the space of two hours to benefit an audience of thousands. Like with drive-by legal or medical advice, you’re a fool to assume you can get something directly applicable to your case from a one-size-fits-all post.
- Parents. Your mileage may vary but parents are often too invested in your safety and security to be able to weigh the benefits of those risky life decisions with huge payoffs and incredible experiences. If your parents are batshit insane (thankfully not my case, but I have seen this) that investment may yield terrifyingly bad advice. Even if the advice you get is reasonable, there’s plenty we don’t need to tell our own parents.
- Your social circle. Excluding a choice best friend or two, your social circle can’t tell you anything useful about how to run your life. Groups breed conformity and breaking from that might be consciously or even subconsciously discouraged.
- Penelope Trunk. (cf. #1)
Penelope Trunk wants to tell you how to run your career. She presumes to be an expert on this subject. She’s not.
Once upon a time, as a young man desperate for growth and success, a blog specifically like hers, geared toward shameless career ambition, seemed like crack. Loyal readership taught me otherwise. Penelope Trunk is someone barely in control of her own life. That she is honest and open about her flaws is endearing but doesn’t change the fact that she cannot provide viable career advice based on personal experience. She’s proudly a trainwreck and while that may be great for her blog’s readership, would you trust a fitness trainer who doesn’t exercise and can’t stick to a healthy diet? Mental health counseling from a patient in a psychiatric ward? Computer advice from someone who uses Windows 98? Come on. I may be an idiot but at least my bullshit detector works.
Only when Penelope Trunk is viewed as a cautionary tale will you find viable lessons for your own career. I would never claim to be qualified to advise you on how to run your life. Nonetheless, if you take the things Trunk has done with her life and imagine the opposite, you may find valuable guidance.
Read on for these lessons.
Little Things: Don’t Ignore ‘Em
I saw this Bing ad on Facebook:
See the little movement lines, there on the left? They suggest the weird little dollar coin is moving from left to right. In western cultures (to whom the ad was targeted) left to right progression is associated with forward motion, while right to left progression signals backward motion. This something you’ll see in movies and comic strips if you’re looking for it. Here’s an example we all know and love:
The stylized arrow beside the word “Back” is pointing, appropriately, back, via a right-to-left perspective, while all of the letters in that word are also skewed right-to-left. The word “future,” conversely, is skewed left-to-right. It’s an instantly recognizable logo that succeeds by embodying its idea without whacking you over the head with it.
So look again:
Bing is talking about getting cash back, but illustrating their point by showing cash flowing away. This isn’t the economy to be talking about cash flowing away. I’m not sure that the dissonance this creates registers for most people but when it’s already unlikely that people will engage with your ad unit, the last thing you do is add subconscious resistance.
Yeah, it’s tiny, but the tiny things pile up into the enormous sand dunes that dog every last Microsoft endeavor with needless, unnecessary friction born of poor taste and obliviousness.
For more on this, enjoy a deconstruction of the hideous Bing logo.
Bad Products: Help A Reporter Out
Publicists are expensive. I do everything I can to keep my costs non-existent, so I don’t have one. But I still want press. One option I once read about that seemed promising is a mailing list called Help A Reporter Out.
Unfortunately, HARO, as it is called, is an awful product. It makes the fatal mistake that many fast-scaling services make: screwing the most important customer.
Three Customers
HARO has three customers: journalists, who need leads, sponsors, who pay for placement, and subscribers, who consume sponsored content and respond to journalist queries.
Subscribers are the most important customer as they are required for both sponsors and journalists to even bother with the product. Without subscribers, there’s no one for sponsors to influence. Without subscribers, the journalists get no responses.
A typical HARO email goes something like this:
- Lengthy sponsored message
- Cutesy personal update from the mailing list administrator, Peter Shankman
- An absurdly long list of journalist queries
The practical result of this is that a subscriber will have to scroll an entire page before they even get to what they care about. Even better, HARO is sent out as often as three times a day.
Now, I disclaimed that as typical. What’s more interesting to my point are atypical HARO messages. These don’t happen often, but happened often enough to piss me off. HARO has particular rules about how subscribers should interact with journalists. It’s pretty obvious stuff, if you’re not five years old, but boils down to please don’t spam the reporters. Sometimes a HARO subscriber would go off the reservation, do something naughty, piss off a reporter and end up in Shankman’s bad graces.
It’s a closed system – a mailing list, after all. The solution seems pretty simple. When applicable, speak to the individual’s boss, if their wrongdoing was in the service of a larger organization. Then, kick the person off the list.
That’s it. Problem solved.
In Shankman’s defense, it seems he does do this. Then he takes it a step further, by venting his frustration into the next HARO email and scolding the entire subscriber base at large. Here’s a sample:
READ THIS: This morning, while being given a behind the scenes tour
at Busch Gardens, I had to spend a portion of the tour on my mobile
phone, calming a reporter from a major publication. Seems someone
at a major agency took it upon themselves to form an opinion on
what kind of story the reporter was writing, simply from the query
alone. Long story short, this was a situation that should not have happened.This isn’t brain surgery here, guys: If you can answer a query, do
it. If you know someone who can answer a query, send it to them. Do
not post them on the web, in blogs, or on message boards, and do
not email the reporter saying “You should do it this way.” Had I
not gotten an EXTREMELY sincere apology from a top-level person at
the agency, I’d be outing the person who caused the mess in the
first place, as well as outing the agency. Instead, he’s just banned
from HARO.Five rules of HARO here: READ THEM.
http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/
I can only speak for myself, but as a former subscriber, it’s worth listing all the things in this message I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a fuck about:
- Shankman’s very special behind the scenes tour
- The frustration of said tour’s interruption
- The existence of an over-sensitive, irate reporter who doesn’t know how to use the delete button on her keyboard
- A rehash of common sense HARO rules I already know
- Shankman’s super-duper ballbusting phone call to top-level Tommy
- The ban of another subscriber
- The power of passive aggressive ALL-CAPS text
The Precious Commodity
HARO exists thanks to a simple reality: time is a precious, ever-dwindling commodity. If reporters weren’t in a hurry, they’d spend weeks on just one story, finding the perfect source for their piece. They don’t have that luxury. HARO to the rescue. Similarly, subscribers don’t have time to build a publicity campaign, research publications or spend weeks pitching themselves. They often don’t even have time to learn how. Again, HARO to the rescue.
The issue is that HARO does not give any reverence to the time of its subscribers. Quite the opposite: not only do we have paragraphs of crap no one cares about at the top of each message, there’s this occasional business of Shankman feeling empowered to command the entire list to spend time reading a rant about the misbehaviors of a single participant.
This doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of time it takes to scour the actual list of queries. Taken in aggregate, it’s shocking. Let’s not forget, it’s a thrice-daily proposition.
The reason it happens is that while subscribers are the most crucial part of Shankman’s business, they’re also the most plentiful – the most easy to replace. Sponsors are magic unicorns, treasured and protected. Journalists are golden geese, continually laying the eggs that make each HARO message. Subscribers? There are tens of thousands of those.
So HARO gets away with it. For now.
Complacency Breeds Contempt
I just checked my calendar. It’s 2009. A mailing list? Hell, let’s move the whole thing over to Usenet. Infinitely more retro chic and you don’t need to bottleneck the queries through a single guy.
The problem with HARO not caring about its subscribers’ time is that it completely erodes loyalty, trading every ounce of goodwill for an ounce of contempt with each message. When something better comes along, they’ll have no problem switching. Ask Blockbuster how that works.
Fine, so you’re saying if I’m going to be a douche and trash this guy’s hard work, I should have a better idea, right? Glad you asked.
Let’s Do It Better
Build a website.
That’s it. A problem actually solvable with a website. Could have been huge during the dot-com bubble, but I bet it’s enough to at least keep Shankman fed. Here’s what you do:
- Persistent accounts that store basic bios and feedback ratings. Elevate the stars, demote those who don’t play by the rules, make it clear who’s making the best contributions
- Categorized, post-moderated, RSS-enabled members-only query threads that let reporters post their queries whenever they want or need. Only postable by verified reporter accounts to keep the bozos at bay
- Tagged queries: instead of having to parse a tedious headline that’s different for each query, provide the option for easy-to-scan tags
- User-configured search agents to send email alerts any time a query seems of interest
- Daily sponsorship opportunities, to keep Shankman in Busch Gardens tickets
That’s it. I bet you could accomplish most of it with Ning, without having to spend a dime. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you could impose a monetary bozo filter for new accounts.
Will it happen? Eventually, I’m sure it has to. Linking journalists with sources is an important job. Just because HARO’s implementation is completely hamfisted doesn’t mean someone else’s won’t eventually hit the mark. Will Shankman do it?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair, via Daring Fireball
So who knows. In the meantime, I’m off to half-heartedly find some other way to get journalists to talk about me.
Bank of America: Your iPhone App Sucks
I know you have a lot on your mind lately, what with your bank purchases and the whole of the finance industry falling apart. Still, I’d like to inspire your engineers to embark upon a simple, fun skunkworks project.