27 My Colonel Cut My Badge In Half And Called Me A Security Breach — He Didn't Know The Audit Showed His Own Office Cloned It

Priya Shah did not stay at Nellis forever.

She was assigned to the Pentagon two years later. She was assigned to a team that was responsible for reviewing the Air Force's access control systems worldwide. She spent four years on that team. She reviewed three hundred and eleven installations. She found ninety-four vulnerabilities. She fixed eighty-one of them.

She was promoted to senior master sergeant in 2031. She retired from the Air Force in 2034 after twenty years of service. She was awarded the Legion of Merit for her work on access control.

She lives now in Las Vegas, in a house with a small pool and a large cactus and a dog named Radar who is a beagle and who is not very good at being a beagle, because he is afraid of the mail truck.

She works as a consultant for a company that audits access control systems for the Department of Defense. She is very good at it. She is the reason that two installations that used to have cloned badges now do not.

Lauren Price is still at Nellis.

She is a senior master sergeant now. She is the senior enlisted leader for the security forces squadron. She runs the checkpoint audits every Tuesday morning. She has run the Tuesday morning audit six hundred and forty times since that morning. She has never found anything like the audit she found on that morning. She has, however, found thirty-one other discrepancies. All of them were corrected. All of them were corrected because Lauren ran the audit.

She named her daughter Priya. Her daughter is six years old. Her daughter thinks that Priya is her aunt. Priya is not her aunt. Priya is her mother's friend from work. But that is close enough.

—

Michelle Okafor retired from the OSI in 2031.

She is sixty-one years old now. She lives in Virginia. She has a garden. She has a husband who is a retired FBI agent and two children who are both in law enforcement. She does not miss the OSI. She does not miss the investigations. But she does miss the moment — the moment in every case when the pieces fit together — and she thinks about that moment often.

She thinks about the morning when she sat in her office and read the audit that Lauren Price had sent to the IG.

She thinks about the moment when she looked at the issuer code and realized that it was the code of a programmer in the security director's office.

She thinks about the moment when she knew, with a certainty that came from seventeen years of investigations, that the man who had been cutting a technical sergeant's badge in half in front of sixty people was not the man who was going to solve the case.

She thinks about those moments and she thinks about the two young women who had solved it instead.

She thinks about Lauren Price, who stepped out from behind the counter.

She thinks about Priya Shah, who built the audit.

And she thinks about what she said at the end of the trial, when the prosecutor asked her what she had learned from the case.

She said, "I learned that the system works when the people in the system do the work. The audit worked because a technical sergeant built it. The investigation worked because a senior airman read it. And the truth worked because the two of them did not stop. That is the whole story. That is the entire story. That is all it has ever been."

—

The checkpoint at Nellis still runs the Tuesday morning audit.

It is a system that Priya Shah built. It is a system that Lauren Price runs. It is a system that the Air Force has adopted at every installation that uses the same access control software.

If you are ever at a military installation, and you see a senior enlisted leader opening an access audit on a Tuesday morning and reading it before the shift change, you should know what you are looking at.

You are looking at a person who is checking the issuer code.

You are looking at a person who is comparing the timestamps.

You are looking at a person who is doing the work that Priya Shah did on the morning of her promotion and that Lauren Price did on the morning of the cut badge.

You are looking at a person who is making sure that the next time a badge is used in two places at the same time, the person whose badge it is does not have to stand in front of sixty people and be told that they are the breach.

That is the whole story.