Making these systems easy to use is the priority. If most everyone follows the rules and doesn’t cheat, we win. That’s how we should think about COVID-vaccine cards and test documentation. So banks often put ease of use ahead of security. Sure, banks want credit cards to be impervious to fraud, but if the security measures also regularly prevent us from using our own credit cards, we would rebel and banks would lose money. But when we’re talking about milder attacks, the balance is less obvious. When it comes to attacks that have catastrophic effects-say, launching nuclear missiles-we want the security to stop all bad actors, even at the expense of usability. Sometimes one is more important than the other. Security measures fail in one of two ways: Either they can’t stop a bad actor from doing a bad thing, or they block an innocent person from doing an innocuous thing. There’s an important difference, though, between the most effective strategies for preventing terrorism and those for preventing COVID transmission. At first glance, asking people for photos of easily forged pieces of paper or printouts of readily faked test results might look like the same sort of security theater. We did a lot of security theater back then: ID checks to get into buildings, even though terrorists have IDs random bag searches in subway stations, forcing terrorists to walk to the next station airport bans on containers with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid, which can be recombined into larger bottles on the other side of security. Read: No one actually knows if you’re vaccinatedīack in 2003, at the height of our collective terrorism panic, I coined the term security theater to describe measures that look like they’re doing something but aren’t. The fact that these measures are flawed is precisely why they’re going to be so helpful in getting us past the pandemic. When it comes to the measures intended to keep us safe from COVID, I don’t even have to look very hard. After all, there’s no standard format for test results airlines accept anything that looks plausible.Īfter a career spent in cybersecurity, this is just how my mind works: I find vulnerabilities in everything I see. I could change the date on an old test, or put my name on someone else’s test, or even just make something up on my computer.
When I fly internationally, I have to show a negative COVID test result. Small imperfections wouldn’t pose any problem you can’t see whether the paper’s weight is right in a digital image. With little trouble, I could print a blank form, fill it out, and snap a photo. My proof of COVID vaccination is recorded on an easy-to-forge paper card.
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