The Human Toll of Jobs / Security with Danny Goodwin & Edward Schwarzschild

Secure Talk - Danny Goodwin and Edward Scharzschild 

Justin Beals: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to SecureTalk. This is your host, Justin Beals. I'm really excited to have you join us today. We have some exceptional guests once again, wo folks, that are joining us today. They are the authors of a book called “Job/Security”. I've had a chance to read it in actual physical form which has been pretty amazing to flip the pages again.

And so let me introduce our guests here briefly and we'll dig into this work. Today with me, I have. Danny Goodwin, who is a professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany SUNY. His photographic, video, and installation work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

Also with us, his co-author is Ed Schwarzschild. He is the professor and director of creative writing at the English Department at the University at Albany SUNY, and he is the author of three works of fiction, “Insecurity”, “The Family Diamond”, and “Responsible Men”. He has also written for The Guardian, The Believer, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us today on Secure Talk, we appreciate it.

Edward Scharzschild: It's great to be here, Justin. Thanks for having us.

Danny Goodwin: Thank, you

Justin Beals: My pleasure. So, uh, we'll kind of, uh, have you guys answer, uh, whoever wants to go first for some of these questions can, but feel free, as we stated, this is a great discussion.

Danny Goodwin:  So we like to do a harmony if that's cool.

Justin Beals: I would only D harmonize us, but there's art in that. Right, Danny?.

Let me just say,  we have three folks in liberal arts backgrounds here. My degree is actually in theater but pretty early on, I started programming, it paid, at the time, really well, 

Danny Goodwin: A little better than theater? Weird. 

Justin Beals: Yeah, I know. Strange. One of the things that stood out to me is,  and has stood out to me, in the security space is how broad it is and how many different types of aspects there are to it. But let's, let's look back a little bit. You both come from a background in academia, storied careers in your respective fields.

Have either of you ever held a job in security yourselves?

Danny Goodwin: We kind of both have. Briefly, very briefly. I mean, Ed, uh, had a, maybe a more serious security job, but, uh, you know, when I was, uh, in graduate school at Hunter College in New York City, uh, my initial job when I hit town moving from, Dallas, Texas to, to New York City, uh, was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a security guard.

Justin Beals: Oh, wow

Danny Goodwin: Because free shoes. That's true. 

Justin Beals: They gave you shoes. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah, they gave me shoes. Yeah, that's right. And they're nice, you know, they're like steel toe, like serious, like art shoes. Yeah. And I didn't last very long because I, I didn't realize, I mean, I, I should have realized that the hours were sort of all in a row and, and it's lots of standing.

And there were rules back then about contrapposto, you know, you can't like lean, and you can't read, and you can't sketch. And I think a lot of that has lifted now. I understand from, from talking to people who do the job now. But yeah, I I lasted, I don't know, a few months, but Ed, tell, tell your, your, 

Edward Scharzschild: Yeah.I mean first I want to say, I'm just, I was really grateful, Justin, that you shared your background because when I was, when I was preparing for today and I was looking at SecureTalk online and listening to some of the podcasts, I, I felt, I'm still intimidated in a substantial way. And I, I feel very much like an outsider, uh, but I'm glad to know that we share this sort of valuing of the humanities and of the bars.

So I'm, I was really happy to hear that. Uh, in terms of my own experience, I was working on a novel for a long time, the novel called Insecurity. And, in that book, the main character works for the TSA. And I was, I was having difficulty writing the book because I just couldn't get access to the world of a TSA worker. I wanted to know what it was like to work the job. And I would try to talk to people when I was getting a, you know, patted down, uh, when I would fly, I would, I would always select the pat down to maybe have a chance to talk to an actual TSA worker, but, those weren't good opportunities to get a real close, uh, kind of conversation going.

So eventually, I applied for a job as a TSA worker at Albany International Airport near where we teach. And took a long time, but I got through the screenings, I got the job, and I worked for a few months in that position, which informed the novel in a major way, but also kind of motivated what Danny and I have been doing, which was to, to get to know better the people doing these jobs, not just in the TSA, I became interested in all the aspects of security labor, uh, to think about who, who, who are these workers and why are they taking the jobs? What does it mean to them? What does it mean to their families? 

Justin Beals: First off, I have to commend you on working for the TSA.

Every time I go through an airport checkout line, there's a certain amount of, man, that would be hard for me to do, staring at the screen at the same time or dealing with weird personali ties.

 Danny Goodwin:  Especially when there's riders coming through wanting to talk to you about your life. And

Justin Beals: I'm sure you had some moments, Ed, where you learn some things about the job and what it takes to be successful at it. 

Edward Scharzschild: Absolutely. I mean, I, I learned things I could have never learned any other way. It turned out right. And, I was working in the 5:00 to 9:00 a.m. shift before I would go into my, you know, my real job.

And, the main thing I learned, I would say, is that these workers who are so easily villainized in the media, you know, it's people mock the TSA all the time and, and I, and I'm sure there's good reason occasionally, but all I can speak about was my own experience at this, at this one airport, Albany international airport and the, the workers I met there, where people who were trying to raise a family. They were people who were looking for a career that could continue to advance in a way. It was, it was secure, you know, where they could get benefits and, and, and build something. So I found that really powerful. I found that kind of as a way to humanize the industry.

I'm not saying it's perfect. I can't speak for what it's like to work at O'Hare or, or JFK or something like, but at the airport where I was, uh, I was, I learned a lot about just the human nature of what it meant to hold the job. 

Justin Beals: Danny and Ed, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the genesis of this project.

You know, what you guys had personal interest in this area, but what kind of brought you together to share in going after it? Sure. 

Edward Scharzschild:, I love telling the origin story of the project. We met when  I started at the university here in 2001, and I had done work as a graduate student for my PhD, researching in American literature about the relationships between writers and photographers. I was really interested in that for a long time. So, as soon as I got here on the job as a new hire, I went to the art department to find a photographer. And, uh, I, quickly found Danny, and we, we hit it off, uh, and we started talking about various things.

And over time, we learned that, we shared this kind of thing from childhood, where we both had fathers who had worked in one way or another for the security industry. Uh, my father was an air; he was in the Air Force reserves for a while. And He always told stories about what he had done, and I always wanted more information about what he had done, as any child would, right?  If someone's talking about parachuting into Lebanon or teaching hand-to-hand combat, you want more information, but he would always say, I'm sorry, it's classified. I can't tell you anything about it.

And then he would occasionally drop other. You know, incredible pieces of stories, but he would refuse to fill them out. So part of the legacy for me, I think, is as a, as a fiction writer, I think it grows out of that, that sort of desire to get the whole story. That, that's maybe a positive benefit, but I think it has negative benefits too, in terms of creating distance and, and that sense of,  the unknown, in a childhood.

And, I mean, Danny can talk about his father, then I can continue the story further. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah, so, so my dad, uh, was an engineer, which is what we knew about him, uh, growing up. And he worked for Texas Instruments in Dallas. Which we thought, you know, he makes calculators, like the calculators., and it turns out he worked on, uh, many of the most, secretive projects, black programs in the military-industrial complex at the time.

Like, you know, the earliest, earliest night vision systems in Vietnam, uh, to, to the tracking systems for, uh, the stealth fighter, uh, which was a super black program, I mean, that was not even supposed to exist at all. Congress didn't give them the money for that. So then they went black and then it was just a bonanza of cash.

Um, to missile defense, another moment when Congress said no. And, you know, SDI turned out to be. Be a thing that happened anyway. Um, and then he was a contractor. He retired at 54. So I'm, I'm going to be 60 next year. And I can't imagine retiring for another decade. Uh, my dad retired at 54 and then became a consultant, so he was sitting then on the other side of the table. So as an engineer, a program manager,  for you know, all these. black programs. The client was always classified, right? Um, but usually CIA, NSA, NRO,  and the various, you know military programs. 

And so when he was a consultant, after he was done doing that, He was on the other side of the table, working for the military and the intelligence community, critiquing the proposals of contractors. And he did that for a few years, and then, I haven't even, I don't know if I've ever even told Ed this story. Maybe I have, but he likes to tell the story of when he got a sense that things may be going sideways, and he exited you know, wrote a Letter of resignation I won't be a part of the problem. I will only be a part of the solution kind of thing. 

And it was shortly after that, that all the people he worked to went to federal prison for all kinds of misappropriation of funds. And yeah, so it was, there was a blacker part of that black program. It turns out that it was largely a criminal enterprise. 

Justin Beals: Yeah, you know, it,  I've had family members that worked, you know, for the military as well. And it's that lack of information, that barrier between you and them, that I think created some of your inspiration to fill in these stories by meeting more people that are doing that.

Danny Goodwin: We interviewed our fathers for this project, which was fascinating, and it didn't make it into the book. Because they were, they weren't useless, but they weren't helpful. Yeah, I mean, they were helpful, 

Edward Scharzschild:  Helpful to us. 

Danny Goodwin: Helpful to us, not helpful in the sense of you know, the trajectory of the book.

Justin Beals: Is this a closure? Maybe, maybe not. 

Edward Scharzschild: No, I still don't know the answer. 

Danny Goodwin: My dad talked about things he's never talked about. It was great. I mean, you know, the standard interview is like an hour, hour and a half. It went like, I don't know how you did the transcription at it was, it was like, two and a half, three hours.

And he revealed to me that he learned after he retired that the CIA was the client for his first black program. He had no idea. His entire career. And there were moments when he worked on the stealth fighter where his supervisor had a lower security clearance than he did, so he couldn't actually tell his boss what he was working on.

He just had to clock in and do the work and, yeah, anyway. 

Justin Beals: I saw I had that kind of experience at my first computing job. I worked for British Telecom and, um, we were rolling out a global data network, and I was, uh, given a key card to the data center and I could get into the data center and rack gear or work on gear, and I realized my boss didn't have a key card.

He would have to ask me to go in and do some work. And I always found that absolutely intriguing, you know, hearing a 25-year-old kid. Getting access to things that likely my boss and my boss's boss and their boss didn't have access to at all. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah learning to live with those blind spots. I mean, that was a big part of the, the, the connection that Ed and I had, you know, it was like, yes, you normalize these blind spots. It's like, yeah, I don't know. Most of the, of the stuff.

Edward Scharzschild: And, and we're both, we're, you know, we're even then at that point, I think Danny was a father, I was, I was soon to become a father. Uh, and you know, it makes you think about what kind of father you want to be. What,kind of relationship do you want to have with your children and your spouse?

Uh, but another thing that happened that was really crucial to the origin of the, of the book and the exhibition that we have up now is, uh, while we were teaching here at the university in 2015, the very first College of Emergency Preparedness Homeland security and cyber security opened up on our campus.It was a Mario Cuom,o was not Mario. Andrew Cuomo was the governor. It was a big deal to announce that this first freestanding college devoted to homeland security. They would have majors, have professors have suddenly had an amazing new building, and we thought, okay, we 

Yes. If we want to push forward with this project, now is the time.

We can talk to people; we can get access, which we, we really couldn't get prior to that. And that, and it also, and we were asking questions too. What does it mean that our, our university now has this college? What are the implications of that, uh, for the rest of us,  for the students,  and for the future?

So I think those, I think, our fathers and then the appearance of this college. Made this project inevitable for us. 

Danny Goodwin: And we, we still have those questions. Like, what does it mean about, about us?  that, like, this is a growth industry?. This is, this is where the jobs will be?,and that's part of the play on words of the title of the book, you know, is job security, Job/Security

What does that say, about us and how to be cynical, still, how complicit are we  in the world? Seeming dangerous. It is dangerous. 

Justin Beals: Certainly, the title stood out to me. Um, knowing that you both have an artistic bent, I kept looking at job slash security and thinking about the stories and slash the, the slash mark is, is a really common thing in computer science. We use it all the time for a lot of different, yeah, yeah. So it can, uh, do concept shifts, dictate, areas of influence, like in a network, things like that. I was curious about the title. Are there archetypes that you're bringing forward with the job/ security?

Edward Scharzschild: What do you mean by archetypes? 

Justin Beals: Like, is it, are there meanings? That are imbued by not just saying job security but introducing this, the slash into the title. 

Danny Goodwin: Honestly, that was, that was our brilliant editor at MIT who, suggested the slash. I mean, we, I think we, I can't remember Ed, how we had the job security colon and then the subtitle.

But I don't think we had a slash initially. I think that was Katie Helke, our editor.

Edward Scharzschild: I think we had a colon and then we couldn't do it. Oh, that's what it was. It was. It was double colon security. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. So job colon security colon. And she was like, no, we don't do double colon. Yeah.

Also, also the initial, the initial title of the book was so ridiculous. I still love it, but it was kind of inspired by Studs Terkel's Working, the subtitle of which is people talk about what they do every day, all day, and how they feel about what they do. And so, our proposed title way back when, when MIT first said, okay, was job security, security personnel talk about the parts of their jobs they can talk about, and how they feel about the parts of their jobs they can't talk about.

Justin Beals: Oh, wow. 

Danny Goodwin: They were just like, absolutely not. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. That's a big one. But it definitely brings forth, uh, something, uh, that I, I think was common is that, uh, In a lot of the interviews and well, maybe we should we should start there for a second help describe for our audience the format of the book the structure. 

Edward Scharzschild: the format of the book is It's mainly I mean, there's a sort of a critical apparatus that comes in in a sort of a forward and afterwards talking about sort of putting what we did in the context, but the main part of the book is interviews and photographs and the, and the photographs are, Danny can talk about how the photographs are divided up. I can talk about the interviews for a moment. The interviews were mostly done in person, face to face, which I think is important. Sometimes we, during the pandemic, we did some interviews, and those were by Zoom, but even when we interviewed someone on Zoom, we eventually met them in person. And we had some standard questions that we would start with and, build out from, uh, about not about trying to seek classified information from anyone, but just trying to talk about exactly what Danny was just saying.

What does it feel like to do this job? What are the, what does it feel like to be a spouse? What does it feel like to be, uh, a, a parent while you're doing this job? What does it do to your family? What are some of the challenges of the work? What things like that. Uh, and, and those interviews would run an hour to two hours.

Then we would get a transcript of the interview, and that would be a pretty long document, usually, including what we said, including what the interviewee said, and it would, it would be, you know, 20, 000 words 25, 000 words, and the editing process was to cut it down to around 5000 words, you know, like a basically a 20-page interview and we would remove.

The first step was to remove everything we, as interviewers, had set right and just have the words spoken to us by the person we were talking to. And then the task, my task was to shape it into a narrative that would be like, I'm a fiction writer. I didn't use, I didn't put anything in, right? I didn't; I didn't tell a story that wasn't being told to me. I didn't, I didn't change any words or insert any of my own words by cut. I cut words and I move things around. Uh, so that my hope is that each interview almost reads like a story in terms of having a beginning and a middle and an end and some, some shape to it. 

And in the book, there's 18 of those interviews that range from border patrol officers to CIA workers, to, uh, people who have been targeted by surveillance programs, to people who are outspoken critics of the security industry, people who work as secret service agents, people who work for emergency management.

We, when we say a composite portrait, we really tried to. Get a broad look, uh, at this field from people, from all perspectives, all levels of employment, whether they were chief of the border patrol or someone who had only been in the border troll for a couple of years, uh, a consultant, a senior junior,  female, male, what just as diverse a group as possible within.

Within one book, you know, it's it's a beginning, of course, but that's what we were striving for. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of the images for the portraits anyway, not only did I need a kind of consistent aesthetic, what? Conceit: I wanted them all to be consistent in terms of composition. And, you know, I made a decision early on.

The people will be all black and white. but also, you know, there's a hierarchy involved in what Ed was just describing and in the diversity of these positions because some people are Okay. Students seeking to go into the field. Some people are retired policymakers in the field.  And all of them are experts of their own opinions, right?

They're all, they're all experts of their own experience. And so they can speak, you know, with authority about what it's like to do what they're doing. So,  I wanted to have a kind of leveling mechanism aesthetically. So everyone's depicted essentially, as you see in the book, they're all presented. You know, kind of the same, a very shallow depth of field.

It's a large format camera. So the face is in sharp focus, everything from the ears back is blurred. So it really doesn't make much difference where the interview took place, except that it made a lot of difference to the person they got to choose where they were interviewed, and they got to choose where their portrait was made.

A lot of them were very confused that. That didn't enter into the ultimate picture. You couldn't see, you know, we couldn't see Ed's father's workshop behind him. It was all blurred out. But he was in his space, and so, slightly this much more comfortable with me having him sit still for a really long time while I take their portrait.

Justin Beals: It seems like, um, the work is very biographical in nature. Essentially, in both that, you, Danny, are trying to capture them in a space where they feel comfortable, but them, you know, not the space, and you, Ed, are trying to capture the story, crafting the story, but it's their story fundamentally. You don't want to shift it.You want to present it with clarity, right? 

Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. For sure. For sure. And that's one of the, one of the things I said in my little bit that I wrote in the book, is that the, the sort of a contrivance of using the camera in the way that I did kind of simulates what happens in your vision when you're actually listening to someone when you're paying attention, you're looking them in the eye, everything else kind of disappears, it's there, you can see it, but you're not, you don't see it.

Aand that's very much like what it was like to talk to these people. We, you know, everything else kind of fell away. You know, we were in an interview where the fire alarm went off, and we sat there for, for several minutes too long waiting to, to like figure out, Oh, I guess we have, yeah, well, I guess we do have to leave.

Right. Yeah, you get kind of caught up and people would tell us things that our handler, you know, handlers at the time would, would tell us they'd never told anyone else. I mean, they just start talking, and it was remarkable. So with the photographs kind of in, in some oblique way, honor that. 

Justin Beals: I certainly have find it so intriguing and heartwarming in a way that you had these experiences with family members where there were gaps in what you were allowed to share with them, and yet you're taking this opportunity to ameliorate some of those gaps by removing the clutter to be engaged with that human being in that moment in time.

Edward Scharzschild: Exactly. I mean, we were, I mean, Danny mentioned, uh, Studs Terkel as, as an influence, you know, a great oral historian. And that's part of what we wanted to do was create, an oral history. And we're  also, you know, inspired by a lot of classic documentary practice, whether it's James Agee and Walker Evans, or someone like a Barbara Aaron Reich, or just, just people who have devoted a huge amount of their lives to going out and finding the stories of people whose stories don't get told enough, maybe.

Justin Beals: Let's talk about a couple of these stories, if y'all are open to it. Some of the ones that I read that I loved, so I hope you'll forgive my editorialization. Uh, but one of the ones that really stood out to me, um, was, uh, Terry Merce. Can you tell us a little bit about Terry and Terry's story? 

 Danny Goodwin: Terry, Terry is contingent faculty with the university at Albany with the, the CEHC, College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, Cybersecurity.

And, she was one of the several people that, uh, our various inquiries with, with, uh, faculty and the Dean in particular, said, Oh yeah, you got to talk to Terry and Ed and I gave a little. brown bag lecture to faculty at CHC about what we were doing. And this was, I don't know, it was a few years ago.It was before we had a book, before we had a contract with MIT. We were like, maybe this is a book, this thing we're doing. I don't know. And Terry, uh, responded to that really positively and wanted to know more about the project. And I was like, okay, so what's going on? You want to know more about us? We want to know more about you.

And I mean, is that a fair characterization, Ed, of how that, that came to pass and we came to talk more with Terry? 

Edward Scharzschild: Absolutely. And there were, you know, as the book developed, there were, you know, we were, we were learning along the way. Like I said, at the outset, at the beginning, we were, we're outsiders, right?

So we, we didn't even know the sort of, the boundaries, uh, of the, the field that we were beginning to explore. And, as we went forward, we would say, Hey, we haven't, talked to a person who does this, or we haven't talked to a person who does that. And so we were, we were really excited to talk to cybersecurity and especially someone who was a female, uh, and who had been in the field for a long time.

I mean, I think Terry's Origin story to me is fascinating. And it was just such a blast to hear her talk about her movement from growing up in Europe to being lured back to the States for an education. Her early work with computers and her facility that was discovered by others and sort of recognize and then she got pushed in this direction, uh, and just kept excelling, uh, in this world that was not dominated by female cyber security personnel, and I found her story incredibly inspiring and the way that she managed to share it was such I wish you could have been in the  room Justin, I mean her she was like bubbly, I mean, she was joyful. And, uh, she was such a, I mean, we talked to a lot of people whose interviews were really heavy, you know, who kind of 

Danny Goodwin: stretches of silence 

Edward Scharzschild: and you walked out afterwards feeling like, you know, you were carrying something, you know, not easy to carry, and it made you appreciate even more the person you had just spoken with.

I think Geri carries a lot too, uh, but her manner and her storytelling were, were just a pleasure to witness. 

Justin Beals: I'm always surprised by people that I meet in technology as an industry broadly. Including cyber security about how personable some of them are, you know, like myself, how many of us, uh, even though we, we certainly work with machines.

Most of the day crave authentic human interaction, right? Yes  I wrote a note down about Terry after reading her story. I wrote The Accidental Spy. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Maybe, uh, would you guys like to relate a little bit to that part of Terry's story? 

Edward Scharzschild: I mean, I could tell one, and then maybe Danny can tell one.

I mean, one of the details that I recall that just, it still makes me almost like smile. I mean, there was a certain guilelessness or innocence to her as  a, uh, maybe she still has it, but certainly as a young woman. And she describes being while she was working in a bar in Europe as a, maybe as a teenager,  she met some people, I think from Czechoslovakia, maybe, who then encouraged her to go take pictures, I think this is, you know, it was post World War II, go take pictures of this installation,  that they hadn't been able to get images of. And, you know, just as a favor. And, and then at the last second, they said, and would you mind using, I think they said, would you mind using like an infrared camera, uh, or, or some, some kind of special camera to get the images? And she was like, she didn't question it at all. She's just like, yeah, these are nice people.I'll go take these pictures. And then, you know, complications ensued. Uh, but that was when you say accidental; that's what I think of. Just like she had. It wasn't like she was born and decided I want to be a cyber security specialist like one thing led to another in part because she was just open-hearted and generous.

Danny Goodwin: She also, she also discovered that she was super smart and super good at the job, better than anyone else around her. you know, that, that has a big part of her  ascendance to the levels she, uh, you know, rose to. Uh, I mean, I, I have to be careful because I can't remember if this is in the book or not.

Cause there were a lot of, a lot of stories that all of these people told that, didn't ultimately make it in the book for various reasons. Um, but Terry's not the only woman who had the experience in the intelligence community of sitting in a briefing and having the person across the desk address her assistant  and the assistant would have to say, no, that's her. You want to be talking to her. Um, and then Terry actually would, uh, vary the spelling of her name. Right, Ed? She would, she would, sometimes she would, her name is spelled T E R R I, but in certain  environments, would, replace the I with a Y.

And that was So that the person would assume that it, that it was a man and then they'd meet Terry and be like, oh, oh, it's you. Oh, and that worked for, for a while.

Justin Beals: It's funny how, uh, we have these preconceived notions of who operates in certain spaces or who can be good at it when in actuality, in my experience, the true innovators like Ada Lovelace around computing, true spy work was done a lot more by women than men as we look back to pre World War II.

And they've not been given  the, I think, the gratitude that they likely deserved and therefore they didn't get the chance to inspire people that saw themselves in that individual to go and pursue those careers as well, and it's it's too bad 

Danny Goodwin: Underlying premise of that novel The Perfect Spy, right?

Justin Beals: Yeah, exactly. Okay. Next interview. I really like this one is maybe a little bit, a little bit darker was Francisco Cantu. Uh, could you, one of you like to describe a little bit about Francisco's background, why you were interested in interviewing him? You 

Edward Scharzschild:, I mean, Francisco, uh, I was interested in talking to him because of the sort of gorgeous, heartbreaking memoir he wrote called “The Line Becomes a River “, reflecting on his uh, Experience as a border patrol agent. Uh, he worked for several years and then left and then wrote this incredible memoir about his experience and what it was like after,  he left the border patrol.

So he seemed like a really important voice, to speak with because he both had insider knowledge and he had decided, and he was reflecting on what it had meant to do the work. He was, you know, all the interviewers were so powerful, and his was extraordinarily powerful,, and I guess that's why we spoke with him, and we got to go see him in Tucson, and just actually visit the border that we had been writing about and hearing about, and I feel like his voice was a really central part of just that border patrol part of the book.

I think we talked to four people in the border patrol, and it seemed vital to have a voice of someone who is looking back in and a bit more critical than other people who had made great lives working in the border patrol. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. And, and, uh, we also talked to a couple of folks, uh, at university at El Paso. UT, El Paso, um, where they have, you know, not the first cause we're the first, but another college of Homeland Security, which, Newsflash, is more focused on the border,  being in El Paso. But we also talked to, Carla Provost, who was the chief of the border patrol under the Trump administration. And one of the sort of not really serendipitous because we set up these conditions, but in a couple of cases in the book, folks are talking about similar or even the exact same subject from essentially diametrically opposed positions.

Both correct because, as I say, they're experts in their experience. And, in a real sense, they're both experts. I mean, Carla Provost was the architect of a lot of the policy that Francisco Cantu had to implement.

And they disagree. They disagree fundamentally about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.  And they'll never talk to each other. Probably. Likely never talk to each other. But in the book, they're in conversation. Because they're both talking about the weaponization of the desert. And whether or not, you know, Kids were really in cages and, and things like that, you know, and whether or not even the job is dangerous, there's a moment, so I don't want to get too, too tangential, but we also have an exhibition, that we can talk about later, uh, that's open now at the museum at our university and, uh, one of the things that we've set up are these video sort of virtual conversations where we've got these 72-inch monitors vertically mounted facing each other about 12 feet apart. And if you stand between the two,  you know, you gotta look one way or the other, but you can't make sense if you're in the center because the audio overlaps.

Uh, but it will track as you move one way or the other. Um, and then you can hear clearly what one person is saying. if you move to the left or the right. Um, and there are moments where on this side, Contu says, this is not an inherently dangerous job. The desert is not an inherently dangerous place. We made it that way.

And Carla Provost says this is an incredibly dangerous job. These are incredibly dangerous people in dangerous conditions. It's like, you know, they're talking about the exact same thing, and they you know, have completely different takes. And they're both experts. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. I wrote down three notes, um, from, uh, the interviews on the border patrol, uh, border patrol as a political background. Border Patrol is a geographic background, and Border Patrol is a personal,  I'm sorry. I'm gonna mark here. I'm gonna repeat that question. Give me one second. Sure. I wrote down three notes in regards to Francisco's interview: Border Patrol as a political battleground, Border Patrol as a geographic battleground, and the Border Patrol as a personal battleground.

It just seemed like a lot of hurt. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah, for sure. And I think, I think Francisco actually says that in his interview. He says something about how the border is a place. It's my home. It's also an idea. It's also, you know, uh, a political thing, something. He says it probably more elegantly than that. 

Edward Scharzschild: And, uh, I mean, the sort of complex nature of that, I mean, is that all the people we talked to when you were talking to them, looking in the eye, you can, you can feel that their intentions are, are good, right?

I mean, Francisco grew up, he grew up living there. He had really powerful memories of being on the border with his mother and what a childhood meant there. And when he went to grad school,  He wanted to find a way to like help the border be a better place. And that's why he joined the Border Patrol, because he thought he could work from inside to improve it.

Other, other people we talked to, Victor, uh, you know, told incredible stories about growing up on the border. With a, with a father who had immigrated into the United States, who took him around and, and said, and took him to work at a slaughterhouse and said, look, this is what you, this is the kind of job you get without an education, I want better for you. 

And then, the border patrol became a great place for Victor to build a career and, and, and try to do good. Uh, And similar with Carla and with Adrian, the other, the other Border Patrol person we talked to, they all, they all are, have this space in their heart where they're trying to improve the situation, even from their diametrically opposed positions.

Justin Beals: Yeah. It is certainly a very tough context in which to operate. They're human beings. There's on both sides, security perceptions. That are constantly being challenged. I did, uh, Danny, I'm glad you brought up the exhibition because there is a lot going on to this project beyond just the book. And maybe I'd love for you to, you know, continue to describe the exhibition itself. Is it at, um, the university presently? 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. I mean, uh, I like to say it's starting there. Oh yeah. You're going to do the origami demonstration. Yeah. That worked really well yesterday on the radio. Yeah, so, so, you know, uh, the exhibition is obviously, obviously informed by the, the book, the project that, that became the book.

But it's a very, very different thing. Um, because, you know, an exhibition can do different things, and a book can do things an exhibition can't do. Um, but  in a nutshell,  what I'm able to accomplish in a physical space is a different kind of engagement with a viewer. So in the book, you page through, and you see, uh, you know, the, the training facility in a risk in New York, for example, you know, the city drugs and, and you know, in the roster field motel And this is gonna mean nothing to anyone who hasn't bought the book. 

So everyone should buy the book.but you know, they all exist eight by 10  and that thing that happens when, you know, I shoot with mostly with a four by five inch view camera. So it's very, very large image, you know, two and a half gigabyte file.

And in the case of some of the photographs, they're seven feet tall. And so, you know, that standing 30 or 40 feet away from it, it's one thing, and it's real. You experience a real thing because it's photography. So this is a drugstore, and then you approach it, and there's a thing where the descriptive level of the, of the camera and the information that's in the actual world flip.

And what I mean by that is, as you approach it, you see more and more detail in terms of resolution, but what is revealed is a conspicuous lack of detail in the real world. So you realize, oh, this is not really a drugstore, then what the hell is it? And and why is it here? Why am I here? And the same with, with a lot of those other images.

A similar thing happens with another set of, of color, large color photographs, that I did for the book, but also. Larger for the exhibition in that they're not real spaces. They're not real photographs at all. And they're the real photographs of models. So in, in a lot of cases, um, you know, I will construct a tabletop model made of paper.

The paper is, uh, made of printouts from Google Earth ground view. And the conceit there is that, you know, early before Google Earth was Google Earth, it was Keyhole which was a startup that was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital. , and now everyone uses it. And in a way, there's, there's a metaphor there in terms of inside, outside of this enterprise.

You know, we're, Ed said, we're outsiders. We don't have security clearances. We don't have expertise. We talk to people who hold these positions and, and work this job. But we're also experts because it affects all of us. We all use Google Earth all the time. We all fly on airplanes. We all, you know, we get to the border, you know, we, we deal with it.

So there's a part of it that's like, yeah. This is like acupuncture. Like everything's connected, you know, so maybe, maybe over here, you know, this person works in security over here. This person feels the effects in their big toe of, you know, a needle that was stuck in their earlobe. That's probably one of those things you're going to have to edit out.

Edward Scharzschild: Maybe it would be helpful to just, I mean, we, we talked about the portraits in the book, but you, we haven't talked about the other three. Sections of the book that are just your images and, and how you constructed those, those three portions and how that, I think that corresponds more to what you're saying about the exhibition.

Justin Beals: Yeah. The, interstitials are amazing, Danny, because you, you have both the models, the picture that you were trying to present that was built out of the model, and then you pull back and show us the space in which you constructed them. 

Danny Goodwin: That was one of those things that, that the editors, insisted on because that's not something I typically do. I don't typically pull back and reveal they mean; I feel like that's, that shows how much I'm cheating. 

And yeah, the editors at MIT were really insistent that that's something important for context and, you know, be generous to the viewer. And so I said, okay, and I love them now, now that I see them, it's like, you know, that's my, I stand in the studio often and giggle at how not, I mean, the subject matter is not funny necessarily, but aesthetically, they're, they can be really silly. And so, yeah, the sections,  the portfolios, rather, that are in the book, and the portfolios that are displayed in the museum.

Portraits are interspersed throughout the book, and one of our earliest decisions was not to just put the person's picture and their job title right up front, which I think is a more standard convention. The interview starts, and as you page through you, you see the portrait, and only at the very end of the interview do you see, Who they are and what they do.

That was important to us as again, a sort of leveling mechanism. And as the simulations, that was the one trip after many years of trying to get access to the state preparedness training centre, Homeland Security, Training Center, um, that is all about, real-world simulation. I mean, a lot of this stuff happens in VR, AR, and, you know, digitally.

And, there are some things that only really work for training to do,  in meet space, yeah. And so this is a multi, multi, multi, multimillion dollar facility, New York State facility, where law enforcement and first responders and lots of folks go and train. Ed and I finally got access, and our request was to have no people present so that I could photograph the uncanny spaces, which I was obsessed with.

And we show up on the day of something called the Excelsior Challenge, where law enforcement, literally from all over the state, hundreds of well-fed, muscular law enforcement were walking around, you know, and they, they show up, and they have to respond to these scripted simulations and compete and be critiqued, right?

One of them was, It's a trailer park where, there's a, there's a peaceful demonstration happening because a teenager was shot by police a week earlier, and now there's a demonstration, but at the demonstration, a bomb threat's been called in, so police have to show up, find the bomb or not,  and also deal with everyone's there to protest the police.

I mean, so someone has to write this scenario and then. You know,  the law enforcement show up and react to it. Anyway,  then there's the portfolio,  the constructions, and those are mostly the tabletop models, Google Earth printouts of spaces that either we couldn't photograph where we actually interviewed someone, and we went physically there, but we weren't able for whatever reason, either security reasons, or it was just not technically feasible to make photographs. And I just reconstructed them, located the place on Google Earth and built a model. 

Justin Beals:  Such a creative way to put your audience in the space that you never had access to through a technology like that. Google Earth. 

Danny Goodwin: I mean, it's really good at visualizing the invisible, right? I mean, that sort of project is showing what's not there.

And so there are a few spaces, and I think you alluded to that in your earlier questions, where you can't see him on Google Earth. They're grayed out, like  the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City, the black wall hitch where we I had beer and conversations with a few people, uh, I couldn't get a good picture of it.

I could get it, in street view photographs, but I couldn't get a model, a 3-D model, which is what I preferred, cause they're weirder. And I  just, you know, kind of clumsily presumed that maybe it hasn't been mapped for some reason, you know, some, some national security reason. I don't know. Cause a lot of spooks hang out there.

So then, yeah, that signaling visually, you know, through the grammar of, of Photoshop and what invisibility I needed to show that like, yeah, that's not really there. 

Justin Beals: So you use the, I mean, class, I have lived with this checkerboard layer since, oh gosh, I built my first website at 97 and was playing around with Photoshop.

And so when I saw these spaces with shadows covered in a transparency layer. I mean, my hard job to beat because the metaphor was so 

Danny Goodwin: happy to hear that because so many people don't get it. 

Justin Beals: I, we for our listeners, you must buy the book to see it. But this idea that you, the absence of data, is a signal unto itself, we say sometimes in security, right? like when we have big areas where we would expect information, like on Google Earth, it's And it is not there. It is telling us something deeply about that particular space. Right. And, uh, Danny, I thought the way you visualized it. Bringing in the metaphor, the transparency layer, but also creating a model.

So, with shape and shadow to the thing made it both real and unreal at the same time. 

Danny Goodwin: It was, it was really. That's really, that's really kind words. I really appreciate that. And I'm so glad that someone gets it. Um, it's, it's, it's probably more messed up than you realize because I also, I operate with rules in the studio.

I need constraints that I can then within, which go crazy. But like total freedom is paralyzing for me. I need constraints. I need, you know, guardrails. So, one of the rules was everything has to be made out of paper. You know, no other materials,  other than glue,  and maybe a pencil. 

And so the, I couldn't print out the checkerboard pattern from Photoshop. I had to draw it. So those are all hand-drawn, uh, little checkerboard patterns onto the surface of the model. Um, It's kind of meditative. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. We spent some quality time with it. Yeah, well,  I read in the book that the project,  the exhibition, the book itself, is really just the beginning of this exploration, and so I, love to hear about what your future plans are for this project Job/ Security. 

 Edward Scharzschild: We have 

Danny Goodwin: Near-term and long-term, uh, plans, Ed. 

Edward Scharzschild: Yeah. I mean, two things we can, two things I can mention. Uh, one is, you know, obviously this, this book is devoted to the American I think the title is the Expanding American Security Industry.

And one thing we've already started to think about is, You know, these are, we are not the only nation that is dealing with these issues and exceed the expansion of a security industry. So we've been working to get international participation in this project, and I spent the last semester in Amsterdam, actually, at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, working with a group of anthropologists and sociologists who have done a lot of work on security labor in, India, in South Africa, in Israel, Palestine, and other regions of the world to sort of make the composite portrait we're creating much larger and to try to think about, okay, what, what can we learn from how other countries are approaching the problem? and we're going to have a workshop here at Albany. 

That's going to be an international workshop on reimagining security labor, and I think that part of our project is going to continue to grow. The other thing we've always hoped in addition to a book and an exhibition, was to also create some kind of web presence so that this archive of testimonies of oral histories can continue to grow because, I mean, 18 is a great start for interviews.

And that's 18 from probably more than 30 that we've already done. I mean, I  believe there need to be hundreds. There need, I mean, everybody should be. Not everybody, but more interviews should be gathered and there should be a space, for them. And some kind of online archive of interviews seems to me and, and, and Danny to be, an interesting direction and an important direction to move in the future.

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. We've also kind of fantasized about,  pulling us out of the equation in terms of managing the interviews, um, and, and having a, a more turnkey user-friendly way for people to just submit.  We haven't figured that out. Do you have any ideas for that? It'd be great 

 Edward Scharzschild: Okay. So, right. Cause we can only, there's just two of us.

Yeah. Uh, we can only travel so far and talk to so many people, but if we can deputize Deputize is the wrong word. If we can involve and collaborate, uh, with, with more people like, students at the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, if it can be part of their curriculum, then this kind of archive can build in a really organic  way.

Danny Goodwin: And a baby step [ toward that is, you know, starting Monday, when we're teaching a graduate course, Team teaching, Ed and I, along with the Dean of the College of Homeland Security, Robert Griffin, and we've got teams of three graduate students collaborating on projects throughout the semester and the, and the three,  representatives are an art, Graduate student, English and Homeland Security.

And so they're, they're forced to work together,  on these problems and projects. So we'll see. It may or may not work, but it's going to work. Okay.

 Justin Beals:  Oh, we always, we always are glass half full. It's where, yeah, things, things are happening. I was telling a friend the other day, the things we work at come true.

It happens. Yeah. Um, there you go. I'm, uh, deeply grateful for the representation that you guys have provided] for workers in the security space broadly. It is a society,  and I don't think we've all the time understood the threads we pull with each other when we do the work together and our passions and what brought us here.

 Everything from providing for a family to a patriotic or a political type passion. And it's all a part of the human experience in a way. And that's been really fun. I want to deeply recommend to our listeners who work in security industry as broadly or finitely as you want to define it. The book, the exhibition, if you're in the area to go see it.

It's amazing to have a critical artistic and story told in the space, and it's really emerging. And so, I highly recommend the book as it gets released. Do we have a release date for it, Danny and Ed? 

Danny Goodwin: The book is out. The book is out. The book is out. It came out August, August 13th. Yeah. Oh, great. It's available. It's available where you buy books. 

Justin Beals: Good. There'll be a link to it in the show links. 

Danny Goodwin: Yeah. 

Justin Beals: Uh, at the end. And, and I'm very grateful to have this time to spend with you guys. Thank you for joining us today on Secure Talk Adam and Danny. 

Danny Goodwin: Oh, thank you so much. This has been really fun. 

Edward Scharzschild: Yeah. Thanks so much, Justin. It really means the world to us that you invited us to be a part of this. It's been a fantastic experience. Thank you. 

Justin Beals: Excellent. All right. Uh, hope you both have a great day. Thanks everybody for joining us.