people-staring-at-computers

When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide: ‘People Staring at Computers’

I really wasn’t expecting the Secret Service.

Maybe an email, or a phone call from Apple. Instead, my first indication that something was “wrong” was a real-life visit from the organization best known for protecting the President of the United States of America.

They rang the doorbell a few times. It woke me up, and I tried to ignore it. There were always kids playing with the doorbells in our apartment building. But the kids don’t normally shout, “this is the Secret Service, open the door,” so I took that as my cue to get out of bed.

[…]

“But how do you make money?”

“I get commissions, grants, and live off artist fees from exhibiting work. I fly to conferences and festivals and do workshops and presentations. Sometimes I’ll do residencies.”

“You’re not some kind of programmer?”

“Well, sometimes I work for other artists who have other specialties, and I’ll write their code. But I’ve been fortunate this last year in that I haven’t had to do that kind of work.” This finally satisfied them. Maybe they were expecting me to be some kind of rogue computer security researcher, or the center of some elusive hacker network.
“So how is the Secret Service involved in this?” I asked.

Yes I know that my brethren go off the rails occasionally, but then that happens to some proportion of everybody. Why should the topic of one’s work make it particularly more relevant, beyond presumed competence?

Do chefs and barbers make more terrifying slasher-murderers?

Do reinforced concrete salesmen pour a more horrifying quality of mafiosi cement shoe?

It’s not even like whether pharmacists make worse drug-dealers, because pharmacists are a professional organisation with special legal privileges and access, whereas that would be both anathema and a disastrous requirement to impose upon the IT security industry.