Mr. Know-It-All: How Do I Deal With My Friend the Encryption Hypocrite?
My pal won’t text me because I don’t use Signal. But he’ll say anything on social media. He’s being annoying, right?
When I think of encryption, I think of Robert Frost. I’ve noticed that the poet is often quoted by cybersecurity consultants. “Good fences make good neighbors,” they like to say, quoting from Frost’s “Mending Wall” as if it were a posthumous endorsement of their products and services. The message is: Encryption is common sense, an ageless good. And while I can’t quibble with their underlying point—particularly in this fraught moment, when we’d all do well to be more vigilant about privacy—the truth is they’re recklessly misreading Frost.
In “Mending Wall,” Frost describes working with his neighbor to rebuild the rock wall that runs along their property line, after another season of wear and tear. It may sound quaint and cooperative and cheerful, but to Frost the whole project is absurd. Because there’s no reason, the poet tells us, to have a wall in the first place. His property is an apple orchard, and the other guy just has woods; neither man has any livestock that might trespass and damage the other’s crops. But the neighbor isn’t so bright, we gather. He just keeps insisting they maintain the wall, and his only justification is something his father used to tell him—a vapid maxim he reflexively repeats because he loves the sound of it so damn much. “Good fences make good neighbors,” the fellow keeps telling Frost.
In short, “good fences make good neighbors” is not the ironclad wisdom our Frost-citing security bros believe it to be. Instead, it represents the exact opposite: the kind of pleasant little ditty we sing to distract everyone, including ourselves, from the fact that we haven’t the slightest idea why we’re doing what we’re doing. And this, I believe, perfectly captures the problem with your friend.
He shows a certain buffoonish lack of self-awareness—marshaling a grating vigilance along one line of his virtual property without taking stock of the bigger, more permeable picture. Before building a barrier, Frost writes, it’s wise to consider what you’ll be “walling in or walling out.” Your friend is myopically focused on walling out hypothetical evil snoops, but one actual person he has walled out is you. Is he being annoying? You bet.
Then again, what really seems to be rankling you is your friend’s hypocrisy. And I’m afraid I can’t support you getting on your high horse over that. I think of hypocrisy as a momentary glitch in an ethical operating system—a sign that we aren’t quite aligning the person we want to be with the person we are. Your friend, for example, is obviously anxious about safeguarding privacy all of a sudden. Just as obviously, he’s doing a crappy job of it. Your task is not to turn away from your infuriatingly hypocritical friend but toward him: to point this out, respectfully, and help nudge his clumsy behavior closer to his sensible ideal. It seems your friend—and Frost’s neighbor—could both use a tutorial on threat modeling. (Look it up.)
If I could pick a different Frost poem for the encryption industry to adopt as its anthem, I’d take a cue from the blog Datonomy, which identified a lesser-known Frost lyric called “A Mood Apart” as the most apt critique of surveillance. In that poem Frost is kneeling in his garden, quietly singing to himself as he futzes about, when he suddenly senses some schoolkids standing at his fence, spying on him. It creeps him out. “I stopped my song and almost heart,” he writes. “For any eye is an evil eye / That looks in onto a mood apart.”
We’re all living, to one degree or another, with the creepy suspicion that people out there are sinisterly looking down on us. Now you see your friend acting on that suspicion, nervously futzing about with his personal privacy regimen. Don’t just stand there at the fence, looking down on him yourself.