There's a thing called the Prepper's Paradox. Prepare for disaster and sidestep it, and your efforts look unnecessary. Don't prepare, and something bad happens, and you failed. Either way, you lose the argument. Emergency managers have been living this particular brand of thankless forever.
When I was little, my grandfather was a firefighter in Los Angeles County. There was a neighborhood in the hills with no fire hydrants and no water towers, because they were "unsightly." The fire department sent firefighters to city council meetings to beg for them, because it was only a matter of time. They kept getting turned down. Property values. Aesthetics. The usual.
Decades later, those communities are still burning at regular intervals, because the people who knew how to fix it were ignored. Shocking. Truly.
In cybersecurity, the threat is invisible, right up until everything is on fire (sometimes literally). And people have no shortage of reasons to do nothing: they're too small to be a target, they have nothing to hide, security tools cost money, it's complicated. The excuses are endless and extremely creative. So they wait. And wait. And then they call us.
A few weeks back, our friends at 404 Media published two pieces that connect all of this directly to real-world consequences. Both are required reading. Go get a refill first.
The first: 'ELITE': The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid. I want to draw your attention to this paragraph:
"It pulls from all kinds of sources," JB continued. "It's a newer app that was actually given to us in ICE." JB said ELITE is what ICE sometimes uses to track the apparent density of people at a particular location to target.
"All kinds of sources." Sit with that.
Think about data brokers. Think about how catastrophically messy that data actually is. In my own data footprint reduction journey, I discovered that a few brokers had splinched (accidentally merged) my data with my husband's ex's data. They decided "married to person X" meant we were the same person — which means any crime she was associated with could have ended up on my record.
Which would then be fed into ELITE.
Cool system. Very reliable. Super trustworthy.
The second piece: ICE's Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice.
Mobile Fortify is another app being used out on the streets. It is, shockingly, also not pulling from clean data, or using it in reliable ways. If you're keeping score at home: two apps, zero quality control, real consequences for real people.
Do the Thing
We've talked about data brokers before — how they're tied to fraud, hacking, spam, and phishing. But right now I need you to connect the dots to something bigger: bad data doesn't just affect your inbox. It can affect your physical safety in the very non-digital, very real world.
So start reducing your data footprint now. Not later. Not in a minute. Not "when there's time" — there will never be time, and we both know it.
The tea is already steeped on this one. Don't wait for the fire.
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