The name of the new book out from Axios cofounders.
Did you know your writing sucks if you want to be heard?

• Eye-tracking studies show that we
  spend 26 seconds, on average, reading a
  piece of content?
• We spend fewer than 15 seconds on
  most web pages…
• Our brain decides in 17 milliseconds if
  we like what we just clicked…

Why it matters: These say “we” and “our” but it means as leaders most our words are
neither read nor heard.
Smart Brevity is a tool to help you write so you can be heard.
But but but…Be smart: you still need smart and relevant content.

Personal Backup.

I mostly write about business and technology, but personal tech matters just as
much and the same lessons apply.
Last month my physical backup went bad and I nearly lost months of photos and
other documents.

• Personal things! Family stuff! Photos of my kids!

But I got it all back. For over a decade I’ve used an online backup service called
BackBlaze to back up my personal files.

• BackBlaze backs up your entire computer to the cloud—even
  external hard drives (!)—for a fixed monthly price.

They mailed me a hard drive with all of my photos and documents, safe and sound.
I don’t get a spiff to write this: I write about it because I think it is one of the most
important things you can do to protect your personal digital life and memories.
BackBlaze.com

My wife sent me the link late Saturday night. I was exhausted from driving non-stop through fog and rain for 13 hours and then hitting the gym for a run to loosen up. The product was perfect: all the parts for a swing set my kids would love. It was almost too good to be true, but the online store was set up on a major site that I assumed would back me up if it wasn’t real. So I charged my AMEX and went to sleep. Three days later, I went to check on my order, and the site was cleared out. Ghost town. I was scammed.

No swing set parts for my kids. And I was out $173. I contacted support for the major site, who told me—in essence—that this was not their problem. I popped open my American Express app on my phone—from a Starbucks between meetings—and told support what happened. Five minutes later, a new AMEX was being overnighted, and I was refunded my $173. There are lessons for leaders at any level of any organization.

Takeaways

• None of us are too smart to fall for a cybersecuritscam. Not you, not me, no one. I catch a lot of this stuff for a living, but at the right moment, I was still susceptible
• Long-term risk mitigation matters. I use American Express because of its reputation for extraordinary customer service. When I chose the card, I chose one that would back me up when it mattered. One great decision made years ago continues to protect me.
• Vendors matter. I’ve had to work with American Express on fraud issues before. They’ve never let me down. That’s why I stay with them. Who is there for you when it matters?

Two-factor authentication is awesome, and I highly recommend it for everything. The most common way to implement it is through codes you get over SMS or text messages. This is not the best way to do it.

It could have been prevented. Here’s what happened. A bad guy with a cell phone and a new SIM card pretended to be my pastor and called up my pastor’s cell phone provider’s customer service. The bad guy convinced them to change my pastor’s phone number over to the bad guy’s SIM card. Then the hackers began to get all of my pastor’s phone calls and text messages.

My pastor is relatively tech-savvy, so he had a two-factor authentication setup on many accounts, mostly through SMS. So after the attackers took over his text messages, they got the two-factor authentication codes. Of course, this doesn’t explain how they got his passwords. This part is simpler. They probably just bought them on the Darkweb, where most of our passwords are available.

The attack is not particularly sophisticated. With minimal training, I could teach you how to replicate it. If you don’t want to learn, you can pay about $10 on the Internet for somebody else to do it for you. Fun times.

How could he have avoided this attack?

If he used app-based two-factor authentication, like Google Authenticator or Authy (my favorite, shown at left), it would have been much more difficult – maybe impossible- for the attackers to get into his accounts. Even if they had gotten control of his cell phone number, they would not have been able to get any codes because the multifactor would have been set up through his application on his physical phone and not through text messages.

Want To Know If A Website Supports Two Factor Authentication (2fa)? Check out https://2fa.directory/, where you can search across hundreds of websites. 

Vice President Pence penned an op-ed in the Washington Post calling the voting rights bill sitting in congress right now a “power grab,” that “nationalizes” elections. He goes on to state that the founding fathers wisely left voting rights and elections in the hands of the state. On this last point he is not wrong.

But let’s start with the first argument, that this is a nationalizing power grab.

Article VI, paragraph two of the Constitution states, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land…”

Simply: the Constitution trumps every other law and federal laws that are under Constitutional authority. A state cannot make a law that is in opposition to the Constitution or one of its amendments.

The “power grabbing” bill in Congress centers around enforcement of the 15th amendment, which in its entirety reads:

Section 1 The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2 The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The amendment does not lay out how these rights may be denied or abridged, merely that they may not be.

In the 19th and 20th centuries these rights were denied by requiring literacy tests and poll taxes, among other Jim Crow era laws. That was not a universal method of restricting rights — most Americans would pass a literacy test today regardless of race — but it was an effective way at that time to keep black Americans from voting.

Today we use different methods to deny or abridge rights, but they are no less real. To place voting precincts in places that are difficult for certain classes of people to go to; to require forms of ID that certain people are less likely to have (or need, except to vote); to restrict voting hours to times that require certain people to forgo wages to vote, how is this any different than a 21st century poll tax?

As Section 2 as the amendment makes clear, Congress has the power to enforce the 15th amendment. A bill to protect voting rights is hardly a power grab.

Let’s examine the Vice President’s second objection, that the founding fathers left elections to the states. They did and they didn’t.

Article I, Section 3 “nationalized” senatorial elections when it required that state legislatures elect senators, it did not give states the choice of direct election.

To the extent that the founding fathers did not require states to have specific voting rules it resulted the following consequences:

1. Most states did not allow women to vote
2. Most states did not allow people of color to vote
3. Most states did not allow men without real estate to vote
4. No state was allowed to let citizens directly elect senators

As late as the 1820s John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe and John Marshall were all involved in state-level conventions that limited voting rights in their respective states.

It would take the 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th amendments and the Voting Rights Act to extend suffrage to all citizens over the age of 18.

Vice President Pence is indeed on the same footing with many of the founding fathers when he wants to allow states the right to deny the right of suffrage.

It is not a constitutional view today, nor a flattering place to stand with the founding fathers.

===

If Pence had kept the definition of “power grab,” to the removal of the filibuster he would have more solid grounds. While it is a constitutional right of the senate to set their own rules (Article 1, Section 5, paragraph 2) it is a rule that has kept both parties in check over the years.

But he did not restrict his view to such, so I will have no more to say on it.