by 
Syndicated here from a posting on the 20th anniversary on LinkedIn September 11th, 2021.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony… –The Matrix
Today, marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I was lead to recount for a friend the irony of where I was and what I was doing on that incredible, surreal day for us all. And in so recounting, I realized I do have a bit of an ironic story to tell, and what better day to tell it then on this day, 20 years later.
I Was Incredibly Safe
On this day, 20 years ago, I was buried deep inside an actual bombproof building just off of interstate 75, just north of downtown Cincinnati. I was a senior consultant for a New York City area based (Norfolk, CT) company called SDG Corporation. And I was designing, developing, and writing the first identity management system for then GE Aircraft Engines, now GE Aviation.
In the simplest terms, Identity Management systems manage and govern all of the digital identities and all of the associated access for those identities within a company. Identity Management is (or should be) one of the bedrock technologies in any cybersecurity initiative in all but the smallest of companies. And I was in the middle of designing and writing the first such system for GE Aircraft Engines on September 11th, 2001.
I was in Building 800 on the GE Aircraft Engine campus just east of interstate 75 and which can be easily seen from the highway on the right side, driving north out of downtown Cincinnati. As I said, Building 800 was bombproof. In those early moments of stunned silence when no one really knew what was going on, how safe any of us were, or what the implications of this disaster were, here I was, fortuitously and providentially nestled in a bombproof building.
I Was Building The Future
I had been coding away furiously, intensely focused, when all of a sudden I realized the very, very large room was in with dozens and dozens of cubicles and personnel was mysteriously and eerily quiet. I stood up and looked around. The mysterious silence was odd to be sure, but I was still quite focused on the code in front of me, so I sat back down and kept working. But something continued to nag at me. Something just wasn’t right.
The bad identities then mattered. The identities of the real people who died that day mattered. And our identities today still really, really matter.
I stood up and far away on the southern wall of the gigantic room I was in were three conference rooms with televisions mounted inside. And literally everyone was crowded around those three conference rooms.
It Wasn’t Jack Welch
Was it Jack Welch? Jack Welch had completely transformed General Electric in the 1990s and was still at the helm of GE at the time. Maybe he was giving an internal company speech from GE headquarters in New York City? That’s about the only thing I could think of that would draw literally everyone from their cubes to the conference rooms.
I ambled over to where everyone was standing, saw the look on everyone’s faces and knowingly sensed this had nothing to do with Jack Welch, and quite quickly and instantaneously became a post-9/11 American. There was America before 9/11, and we all know there has been a different America after 9/11. We all crossed a threshold once each of us witnessed the first impact, and I had just crossed that threshold.
Identities Define a Post-9/11 World
What we were doing the moment we heard the news as a general rule has galvanized that activity and created an unbreakable link between 9/11 and all that it means and what was being done at that time. I was “doing Identity Management.” And I’m still “doing” or working in Identity Management exactly 20 years later. So there’s a very strong link between what I was doing then, what I’m still doing today, and 9/11 in my mind.
So many ironies existed for me on that day. Again, I was in a bomb proof building, developing software for the same company that freaking made the engines in most if not all of the planes that hit the towers. The power and thrust of those incredible engines, used for absolute good every hour of every day for decades, is what drove those airplanes, this time used as weapons, deep into those buildings, literally killing thousands. The parent companies – both SDG Corporation and General Electric – were based either directly in downtown New York City or in the New York City metro. To say these ironies were not lost on everyone in that gigantic room in Building 800 that day is an understatement. Suddenly nothing I was doing that day mattered.
And yet at the same time, every single thing I was doing that day has mattered more than I could have ever imagined.
It All Still Matters
Identities and access matter. On that day 20 years ago, in the early morning hours, while all Americans were getting up, having coffee and breakfast, and getting ready for what we thought was going to be any ordinary day, there were innumerable breaches of access. There were misidentifications. There were assumptions about identities made. There was malicious activity going on. There was falsification, and lying, and nefarious intention, and fateful execution and mis-execution going on. And we’ve all paid for it. Both the men and women who lost their lives that day as well as every American since in one way or another.
And I am one of the fortunate ones, caught in a web of ironies, getting up every day and in some sense doing an act of remembrance. I get up, have coffee and breakfast, and on most normal days as we all expected that day, I still “do Identity Management” for companies like GE Aircraft Engines every day. I still “stand up in my cube” (in a manner of speaking) and listen to the eerie quiet out there around identities where every day there are bad, malicious actors in a post-9/11, mostly electronic world who falsify, lie, have nefarious intention, and where companies every day are battling execution and mis-execution around identities.
The bad, malicious identities then mattered. The identities of the real people who died that day mattered. And our identities today still really, really matter. You could say that almost everything about how America has changed since has an awful lot to do with identities. Identities are everywhere and tied to everything that matters.
I can’t say that I stayed in this line of work because of 9/11. And I’ve done a few different things in the intervening time (all related to cybersecurity). But I can honestly say the irony of it all isn’t lost on me every September 11th when America takes a moment to remember. And 20 years later, what I do every day has a positively fateful direct line back to 9/11. And so my own personal remembrance isn’t just one of mere notion, but one of action. Every ordinary day.
Fate, it seems, will never lessen my personal sense of irony.
