After the Alerts

Thinking about Information Security while Hosting a UC Davis Symposium

Dear Friends,

Today I got to be the master of ceremonies at The UC Davis Information Security Symposium. The more than 100 attendees got to learn from experts from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I got to introduce guests, fill time with announcements about the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology (which I also get to host), and, my favorite part, read an original poem about information security and the various topics, themes, and alerts raised at the conference.

Find my poem, below.

After the Alerts

The stewards of our systems speak of doors
most of us never see:
doors made of numbers,
doors that open when a tired hand
touches the blue blossom of a link.

Somewhere a classroom fills.
Somewhere a grant proposal
leans toward its deadline.
Somewhere a payroll file ripens,
and a student sends one true sentence
into the machinery of a course.

And beneath it all,
the almost-invisible keepers
tend the rootwork underneath:
patch, permission, protocol,
the small liturgy of access,
the patient mending of the net
before the morning catches.

They know how danger arrives:
it speaks our jargon,
it borrows our names,
it wears our campus colors,
it polishes its teeth
with perfect grammar.

They understand the human system
inside the technical one:
the hurried professor,
the student wanting only
to solve one more problem set before dinner.

So they build more than barriers.
They build habits of looking twice,
rooms where questions can enter,
a table long enough
for the expert and the newcomer,
the analyst and the poet.


Collaboration becomes a kind of shelter
large enough to hold
all our whispered passwords,
all our bright mistakes.

And if the university is a body,
then this week we have named
some of its nerves,
some of its scars,
some of its sleeping alarms.


Do not snooze.

We leave with our pockets full
of ordinary instructions:
check the sender twice,
ask for help,
keep learning.

Carrying new cautions,
we leave together,
which is the oldest security,
and the best beginning.

Thanks to the organizers of the symposium for involving me and for making room for poetry, a mode of expression that I think should open or conclude every major event or gathering.

Dr. Andy