Balancing Security

For your IT security, you want

• Security
• It must be cheap
• And comfortable

Now choose at most two.

As always in life, everything has a cost. There is no cheap way to be secure which is also comfortable. Home Depot chose “cheap” and “comfort” – you’ve seen the result. Mordac would prefer “secure” and “cheap“.

Those example show why the answer probably is “secure” and “comfortable”. Which means we’re facing two problems: “cheap” is out of the question and the two contradict each other. Secure passwords are long, hard to remember, contain lots of unusual characters (uncomfortable the first time you travel to a different country – yes, people there use different keyboard layouts). Turns out there is a “cheap” part in “comfortable”.

Taking this on a social level, the price for security is freedom. To quote Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I don’t know about you but I feel bad about terrorists dictating us how much of our freedom we have to give up.

In a similar fashion, you can either punish criminals or prevent future crimes but you have to choose one. We have learned through bad experience (witch hunts, flaws of the US penal system) or good (like the Norwegian system) that punishment doesn’t always help nor does it make victims happy. Which leaves us with the only conclusion: We, as a society, pay money to prevent future crimes because that’s the most reasonable thing to do.

Even if it leads to people mistakenly attribute modern penal system as “holiday camps.”