In a strange confluence of language, politics and Internet security, Open Door Networks’ president (and book/blog co-author) Alan B. Oppenheimer was quoted in a New York Times Magazine article, “Bird-Dog Minute,” about the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. And it’s not just any New York Times article. It’s an article by Pulitzer prize-winning political columnist William Safire. The timely article juxtaposes Alan and Open Door with the likes of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. “It’s my 15 sentences of fame,” Alan was heard to remark.

In all seriousness, the second half of the article is interestingly about how the term “fire wall” (Mr. Safire insists on writing it as two words) has come to be “the hot new word” in presidential primary politics. Referring briefly to its first citation in 1799, the article devotes most of a paragraph to the word’s modern-day history, as conveyed by Open Door’s president (italics are from the article):

1. Fire wall, first cited in 1799 as a literal wall between houses to prevent the spread of fire, gained new popularity in 1991 in computerese. “Fire walls were dedicated pieces of hardware that were placed between the Internet and organizations’ networks to ward off attacks,” says Alan Oppenheimer of the security firm Open Door Networks. As “personal” fire walls became necessary, in 2002 Microsoft and Apple began building them into operating systems; “wireless networking made fire walls even more critical, since access can come not just from the Internet but from your neighbor.”
   

For those interested in the back-story to these sort of things, there’s not really much to it. Mr. Safire’s assistant contacted Open Door Networks looking for an expert in the history of computer firewalls. Figuring he was probably as qualified as anyone else (and honored to have been chosen), Alan sent back a page-long overview, from which was extracted (a few weeks later) the above paragraph.

One snippet from the article is particularly timely, with make-or-break primaries coming up tomorrow. Referring to Hillary Clinton, the article quoted a source as calling out “Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania, which are the three big fire walls she’s counting on.” I guess we’ll know very soon now if those firewalls did their job!