This is part one of my Christopher Hitchens’ style diatribes on modern issues. The first being, of course, the password. Buckle in ladies and gentlemen.
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There is a particular form of bureaucratic sadism which has attached itself to the password.
One begins with a perfectly serviceable word.
It is rejected.
“Your password must contain at least eight characters.”
Very well.
You add characters.
“Your password must contain one uppercase letter.”
You oblige.
“One number.”
Fine.
“One special character.”
Now we are no longer choosing a password. We are assembling a small explosive device.
And then, at the end of this ridiculous ceremony, having produced something resembling the registration number of an Albanian submarine, one is informed:
“Password cannot contain a previously used password.”
Of course not.
Because heaven forbid that the human being should remember it.
This is done, naturally, in the name of security.
Security!
One notices that the word is always invoked at precisely the moment when common sense is about to be murdered.
The system has decided that the great threat to civilisation is not the criminal, nor the compromised database, nor the company which stores millions of credentials in some server farm in Ohio.
No.
The danger is you.
Specifically, your failure to include an exclamation mark.
And so one is forced to create something like:
“Rhubarb!7Cemetery#”
which is then forgotten within eleven seconds and immediately written on a Post-it note underneath the monitor.
Thus does security improve.
What is remarkable is the serenity with which this nonsense is imposed.
Nobody asks whether the procedure has made the user safer.
The important thing is that the ritual has been completed.
The uppercase letter has been supplied.
The symbol has been inserted.
The number has been appeased.
And somewhere in the organisation, a compliance officer can sleep peacefully in the knowledge that the sacred requirements have been satisfied.
This is not security.
It is password hucksterism.
It creates the appearance of rigour by transferring inconvenience downward.
The institution feels safer because you feel more irritated.
And then comes the final indignity.
You forget the password.
Naturally.
So you click “Forgot password?”
An email arrives.
You choose a new one.
And the system says:
“New password cannot be the same as your old password.”
At which point one begins to suspect that the machine remembers your password rather better than you do.
Which raises an obvious question.
If it remembers the damned thing so well, why am I involved?