Threat Model

I had a joke about Indian politics. My parents live in India, so unfortunately it remains in drafts.

I had a joke.

A good one, actually.

At least I thought so.

My first instinct was to write it down.

My second instinct was not:

Is it funny?

It was not:

Will people get it?

It was not even:

Will this age badly and become satire retroactively?

My second instinct was:

Can someone find my parents?

Which is a perfectly normal question to ask before publishing comedy.

Apparently.

So I did what any responsible engineer does when faced with a stupid joke.

I performed a threat model.

Assets

One political joke.

Two parents.

The joke is replaceable.

The parents are not.

Threat surface

The internet.

A famously calm place where everyone understands context, disagreement remains civil, and nobody has ever developed a parasocial relationship with a politician.

Vulnerability

My parents have a permanent address.

Very poor operational security on their part.

They also have names.

Again, not ideal.

Threat actor

I do not know.

That is sort of the problem.

Maybe nobody.

Probably nobody.

Almost certainly nobody.

But "probably nobody" is a strange thing to bet your parents on because you wanted strangers on the internet to exhale slightly harder through their noses.

Mitigation

Shut the fuck up.

Very effective.

Terrible for comedy.

I live in Germany.

I can write the joke here.

I can publish the joke here.

I can close my laptop, make coffee, and go to sleep here.

The people I worry about are thousands of kilometres away.

They did not write the joke.

They did not approve the joke.

They probably would not even find the joke funny.

And somehow they are part of its blast radius.

Fear, it turns out, is geographically distributed.

The author is abroad.

The attack surface is at home.

I wish I could tell you this was about something important.

It was not.

I was not exposing corruption.

I had no documents.

No sources were risking their lives.

Nobody had leaked me state secrets.

I had a pun.

That was it.

A fucking pun.

And before publishing it, I found myself doing collateral-damage analysis.

Maybe this fear is irrational.

I hope it is.

Maybe I have spent too much time online.

Maybe nobody cares what some engineer with a website thinks about Indian politics.

That would be the ideal outcome.

Irrelevance has never sounded so comforting.

But fear does not need a high probability.

It only needs a consequence you cannot afford.

So the joke stays in drafts.

Not because it was hateful.

Not because it was dangerous.

Not because I stopped finding it funny.

Because my parents live in India.

Somewhere on my laptop is a joke about Indian politics.

It is very funny.

You will have to take my word for it.