My wife brought an email to my attention this morning. It came from her employer, and was asking her to click ‘here’ in order to refresh her password for two-factor authorization (2FA).
The origin email and IP addresses looked good to me, but in the body of the text it mentioned that you could click on the following link for more information.
I hovered over the link, noted the website to which it referred, and looked into it. It doesn’t exist. I told her I thought she was right to be skeptical, and that I’d ignore it until she could run it by an IT person (or her supervisor) from work.
I think she felt differently and clicked on one of the buttons. She quickly received an email from the employer’s IT division, basically saying that this was an internal test, and that she’d just fallen for a potential phishing scam.
That’s an active internal security process that helps keep the system safe from outside attacks. It’s one guardrail of – I’d imagine – many.
But it’s one that addresses the all-too-fallible human element, and the well-meaning human element at that.
What are our guardrails this time around? Think about how close Trump came to possibly overthrowing the legitimately-elected government of the United States of America.
The cynicism and honor of Mike Pence, and – I still can’t believe it – the decency and patriotism of Dan Quayle were among the very few things that kept this autogolpe from possibly succeeding.
When we talk about the difficulty in implementing an agenda – no matter how unconventional, unconstitutional, unethical, or antithetical to the interests of the country writ large – it’s important that we ask ourselves what actually stands in the way.
And then – like my wife’s employer – we test our security measures and guardrails in any way that we conceivably can.
Personally? I don’t make a lot of predictions, but I am anything but sanguine that Trump and his cronies will be easy to restrain by any heretofore understood ‘conventional,’ bureaucratic, civil, procedural, and judicial means.
Like everything else about America, much depends on a handshake deal – on people acting in good faith and hewing to exceedingly well-established norms and conventions.
For any who inexplicably managed to ascribe good faith to Donald J. Trump through the end of 2020, I still can’t imagine how January 6th didn’t radically alter that view.