Years ago I won the TSA competition for security slogans.

I’m not proud, especially because I didn’t enter it and nobody told me my slogan had won until an external investigator pointed out that someone borrowed it from my 2006 blog post and claimed the prize for themselves.

Anyway I’ve written a little here about the strange dearth of security slogans, a missed opportunity, during COVID-19.

Now I’m really getting curious why US officials are trying to encourage things like mask wearing, yet nobody has come up with basic jingles to promote it.

A quick search has only turned up a 1918 example from San Francisco.

Obey the laws, and wear the gauze. Protect your jaws from septic paws.

Seems applicable today. If I don’t find posters of this soon I may just start making them myself. With luck, someone at TSA will notice and then submit to their next competition as their own.

Speaking of being owned, while reading the news about security flaws in popular video conferencing my mind wandered onto the rhyme… gloom and doom for a chat room vacuum. How soon could it ruin the zoom boom?

Not quite “loose lips sink ships” but maybe if I work at it a little I could get closer with chat room vacuum ruins zoom boom. The problem is it’s too specific to one company, but hopefully you get my drift.

Speaking of drift, the US Naval History Blog in 2019 posted a very graphic warning about pandemic risks, and it starts by quoting a 1918 children’s rhyme:

I had a little bird,
And its name was Enza.
I opened the window
And in-flu-enza.

Ok, I couldn’t resist. Here’s a simple security education poster from WWII, which I’ve updated simply to reflect COVID-19:

It’s become infuriating to me every time I hear someone say they’ve seen 0 deaths so far, or who ask why worry if they don’t know someone personally affected. Education campaigns are sorely missing here.

Security professionals ought to be good at predicting likelihood and severity of harms. Prediction is what the industry is supposed to be doing in order to put controls in before it’s too late (as well as clean up afterwards, but let’s not go there). So let’s have some slogans going and get word out maybe?

A simple viz shows why the 0-deaths-so-far-crowd need quickly to get a clue, but it doesn’t make for a pithy phrase or poster.

Let me know if you can think of any good way to condense that graphic into a rhyme…