I‘m a reasonable man, and I take reasonable precautions to secure my property. This means keeping a lock on all the doors of my house, hiding the spare key somewhere other than under the doormat, and peeking out through the Venetian blinds to see what’s stirring when the dog barks in the middle of the night. I don’t go for multiple locks and chains on the front door, fancy electronic alarms, or grabbing the .12 gauge for a stroll around the neighborhood whenever the dog’s ear twitches. Not that there’s anything wrong with those who err on the side of vigilance: On how to strike a proper balance in these things reasonable men may differ.
When it comes to my virtual property on the Internet, I would be delighted to take a similarly relaxed approach, if only I could. One of my goals in life is to have no electronic secrets worth cracking. My favorite password, when I can get away with it, is “password.” My email archives are an open book–a tedious, incomprehensibly boring book, in fact, and nothing that would cause me to lose a minute of sleep were an antagonist to steal my laptop and hand it over to Matt Drudge.
My financial accounts are similarly, monotonously dull. One of my brokerage accounts is slightly embarrassing: It has a total value of 12 cents ($0.12) that it has maintained for the last three or four years–the residual value of 126 shares of stock in one of those bankrupt Internet high-flyers. Some days, when the market tanks, it subsides to 11.9 cents. And when the bulls are running, it has been known to climb as high as 12 and a half cents. It would make a neat story to say that I keep this account open as a stern reminder to myself that there’s a reason I work in Washington and not on Wall Street. Truth is, I can’t remember the security password to liquidate the thing. And I’m not about to spend 30 minutes navigating the brokerage firm’s voicemail labyrinth to obtain a new one.
Believe me, I’ve tried all my favorites–“password,” “password1” (in case they required a number), “psswrd” (in case there was a limit of six characters), not to mention my really clever ones that no one will ever guess, “Starr1” and “Starr2.” No dice.
Alas, I find myself forgetting more and more passwords these days. My memory is fine, by the way. It’s the passwords that got complicated. As I say, I’m a reasonable man. I can understand that a brokerage firm wants to take precautions. After all, what if I were to hang out at one of the public library computers, day-trading online alongside all the homeless men? If I absent-mindedly walked away without logging off, a good password system would keep my fellow investors from emptying the account and using the purloined funds to buy a swizzle stick at Starbucks.
But what explains all the other websites now making deeply unreasonable password demands? My credit card company must think the CIA is after me. Every month they come up with a new security scheme. It’s not as if my mother’s maiden name has recently been in the news. As far as that goes, what’s the worst thing that would happen if someone were to break into my online credit card statements? God forbid they should pay off this month’s balance for me.
No matter: My mother’s maiden name is no longer good enough for Citibank. They insist that I also make up answers to three password challenge questions chosen from their list. And that’s not the worst of it: They seem to have convened a focus group of 10-year-olds to come up with the questions. Here’s one of their possible challenges: “What’s your favorite color?” My answer: I don’t have one. Here’s another: “What is your best friend’s name?” I don’t have one of those, either. Or how about this: “What’s the name of your first pet?” Well, that would be the turtle we wrapped in Kleenex, put into a metal Band-Aid box, and buried in the back yard with a full color-guard/casket detail. And no, I don’t remember the turtle’s name.
You know, if the Bush administration had contracted out the war on terror to Citibank’s credit-card security consultants, the New York Times would never, ever have figured out what was going on. I finally settled on the only three questions that had non-ambiguous answers. What is your favorite cartoon character? What was the last name of your first grade teacher? What is your oldest sibling’s nickname?
The answers are Underdog, Mrs. Carney, and Bill. Those are for my benefit, not yours. Now when I need to access my credit card records, I’ll at least have this permanent, printed record of the passwords to refer back to.
RICHARD STARR
