It seemed to be one of those moments that could only have happened by the weird confluence of events and times in which we find ourselves. Were any one of these not to take place this wouldn't be a thing. But just as the pandemic itself is most probably the unlikely confluence of a bat, a civet and a human hanging out together in a street market in a remote province of China, this current footnote to history is what you get when things that don't belong together, well, do.
It reads like a bad a joke where the three walk into a bar, or a recipe for a cocktail invented on the Lower East Side. It starts with one part governing by tweet. As Twitter grew from a curiosity, where Ashton Kutcher outraced CNN to be the first with a million followers, to a tool for communication, with breaking the story of the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 as the "Miracle on the Hudson," it was perhaps inevitable the social media service would cross from margin to mainstream. And while an earthquake in Haiti and the Arab Spring demonstrated the service's reach, credit the last administration with setting a new paradigm. While the Declaration of Independence is hailed as an elegant and masterfully written argument, one wonders what Jefferson would do with just 280 characters; "George: We're done. Keep the stamps and tea, we'll take the land. Forget the UK; we're now the USA."
Then there's the aforementioned pandemic, which has upended almost every traditional notion about the separation between work and home. While not all were fortunate enough to make the pivot, many are able to do their jobs far from their usual places of employment. That meant rethinking the concept of schools, trading floors and call centers. And it also meant that professions which used to be done in highly secure facilities were now taking place in dens and converted bedrooms, where security went from armed guards and biometric IDs to putting a chair in front of the door.
And then you have kids. The wild card in any situation, they will do whatever they are going to do. All the safeguards, all the admonishments, all the supervision in the world doesn't amount to a hill of beans when they set their sights on something. After all, while they say that Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the Great Chicago Fire, what they don't tell you is that there was probably a tot pulling her tail.
So you have this unholy trinity: social media, a formerly secure worker now homebound, and a child. Each alone, not a problem. But together? That accounted for the most frightening news of the week. Not a new variant, not some spoiled J&J vaccine, not the First Dog nipping yet another individual, but a toddler briefly seizing control of the Strategic Air Command's Twitter account.
At 7:48PM on a recent Sunday night, the account of the branch of the military responsible for our nuclear arsenal posted this: ";l;;gmlxzssaw." Roughly a half an hour later it was deleted. Was it a coded order to a nuclear sub? Coordinates for a target in North Korea? A command to go to battle stations? Nah, none of that. Seems the manager on the USSTRATCOM Twitter account walked away from his home computer without locking the system down, and his "very young child" took control of the keyboard. And before you could say DEFCON 4 the toddler had almost commandeered US forces for his or her own purposes.
Thankfully nothing happened, and the random blast was quickly flagged and disavowed. But could Junior have accidently typed something more damaging? It calls to mind the theory that, left alone, a bunch of monkeys banging on a typewriter could emulate Shakespeare. It was put to the test in 2003, when a team at the University of Plymouth's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology placed a keyboard in the enclosure of 6 Sulawesi crested macaques at the Paignton Zoo. One month later they had produced 5 pages of nonsense, and spent most of their time "urinating and/or defecating on the computer until such time as it stopped working." So in that light, perhaps ";l;;gmlxzssaw" is far from the worst that could have been done to the SAC account to, well, gum up the works.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford still doesn't understand how to use social media. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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