Tag: Security

Wrong Lane

by pennypostcard • November 24, 2025 • 7 Comments

After more than six weeks of the longest government shutdown in history, things were finally starting to brighten up towards mid-November. After a sudden medevac to Bangkok, my husband V had successful gallbladder removal surgery and returned home to Rangoon. The U.S. government reopened and federal employees received our three missing paychecks in quick succession. The bid season relaunched, sparking renewed excitement about our potential next tour. V and I spent a day off together in observance of a Burmese holiday—swimming in our favorite local pool, then enjoying a quiet evening at home relaxing with our cat. All seemed to be getting back to normal.

Then, the following Saturday night, we had one of the worst nights of our lives—sudden, unexpected, and completely out of the blue. It was the kind of night that shifts your reality, stripping away any illusion that you are in control and leaving you in a world so different from the one you knew just moments before that the surreality comes in continual waves of disbelief.

Foreign Service, U.S.

It’s a FACT

by pennypostcard • July 19, 2025 • 1 Comment

V and I spent last week out of town at the five-day Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training, otherwise known as FACT. Typically, FSOs attend FACT every five or six years. However, we had not been for 10 years — since spring 2015. When we last attempted to complete FACT in March 2020, our timing was unfortunate — the world was just beginning to shut down due to COVID-19. We had already unpacked and were relaxing in our hotel several hours away when, on a Sunday evening, we learned that the weeklong FACT session scheduled to begin the following morning had been canceled due to the emerging pandemic. We were so close, but missed out. We went to Ciudad Juárez on the same FACT waiver everyone received during that period. But in 2025, the stars finally aligned and we checked FACT off our list once more.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Know the Signs

by pennypostcard • July 25, 2024 • 1 Comment

In addition to ending my fourth tour and traveling to the west coast to see family, I did two other important things in Washington, DC in June. I had an opportunity to march in the Capital Pride Parade as a volunteer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and I went to a work-related training on atrocity prevention at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

Both the volunteer work and the training provided opportunities to reflect on important signs we may see that things are going wrong – before it’s too late.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part II

by pennypostcard • March 17, 2024 • 1 Comment

In my previous blog post, I began to tell the March 2023 story of how a hacker took over my Facebook account. If you missed it, I recommend reading Part I at the link before reading Part II. At the end of Part I, I’d left my tale of woe on a cliffhanger after reaching out to the hacker who had gained access to my Facebook account and locked me out.

The hacker had changed the phone number associated with my account before the primary email address. So I’d been notified via email of his real phone number. It had a Nigerian country code, and I’d found the number active on WhatsApp. The location data Facebook had sent me associated with the new primary phone number for my account indicated the hacker was in Southern California using an iPhone 6S. I wasn’t sure if he was actually in California or perhaps in Nigeria using a VPN to obfuscate his location. I was inclined to think the latter, given his iPhone was about eight generations behind. But at that point, it didn’t really matter in practical terms. He was in and I was out. I had fallen for a dumb scam thinking I was talking to a friend I’d known since 1999 when in fact, it was a total stranger.

Weighing the risk he might try and extort or blackmail me against the fact Facebook had locked down my account and he couldn’t see my personal info anyway, I decided to see what would happen if I contacted him directly.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part I

by pennypostcard • March 16, 2024 • 3 Comments

Recently I was talking with some colleagues at a happy hour about ‘pig butchering,’ one of the more nefarious financial scams to emerge from Asia in recent years. In the high-tech long con, a stranger grooms an unsuspecting target through social media or text messages to invest in cryptocurrency. Like fattening a pig for slaughter, the ‘friend’ gradually convinces the target to trust in the relationship enough to take investment advice. After some encouraging returns, the target’s confidence grows. But what the pig butchering victim believes is the beginning of a lucrative opportunity crumbles once they’ve sunk in the desired margin of cash, and the stranger they thought was their friend vanishes with their money.

Sounds dumb, right? Who responds to an unsolicited text or chat from someone they don’t know? Let alone becomes their friend, let alone then sends them money? I was surprised to find out how pervasive this has become.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Foreign Service Housing, Part III

by pennypostcard • July 4, 2023 • 3 Comments

In Foreign Service Housing, I wrote about the embassy homes where we lived during our first two diplomatic tours in Uzbekistan and Australia, respectively. I later wrote about the PCS Lodging apartment where we lived in Arlington while I studied Spanish ahead of our third tour in Mexico in Foreign Service Housing, Part II. Even though we left Mexico a year and a half ago, I want to finally write about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our house in Ciudad Juárez. I probably have avoided this topic at least in part because thinking about everything that happened with the house brings back negative memories for me. Astute readers may have picked up on my ambivalence (at best) the day we left. But in the interest of sharing my honest perspective, I’m going to try.

I had found it difficult in the past to relate to people who I perceived to be… overly critical about their diplomatic housing. After all, it doesn’t cost us anything and is a useful benefit of our employment. Two stints on housing boards over my first four years in the service gave me the impression some people will complain about anything and everything, like the person who demanded the embassy pay for and install a bay window in her kitchen or she would request a move, or another who refused to come to post with her husband because they were assigned a house she said was not possible to fung shui. Whether or not I thought these requests were reasonable was one thing; the fact we had such limited latitude to make people happy was another. I decided to be happy in my homes even though things were not perfect. On balance, there was far more good than bad. But it wasn’t until my tour in Juárez and the nuances of being truly unhappy in a house, that I realized firsthand some circumstances warrant complaining.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Life on the Border: 10 Times When Heading ‘Across Town’ Can Be More Than You Bargained For

by pennypostcard • November 28, 2021 • 4 Comments

Serving at U.S. Consulate General Ciudad Juárez as a Foreign Service posting has had the unique benefit of proximity to the United States: El Paso, Texas is less than five miles away. Ciudad Juárez and El Paso in many regards feel like one city. If you read about the history of this area and in particular the resolution of the Chamizal dispute in the 1960s over 600 acres of disputed border territory, you will start to see how the geographical, historical, social, and economic ties in the second-largest U.S. border community (behind San Diego and Tijuana) have been tightly interwoven over hundreds of years. And despite the border closure to non-essential travel between March 21, 2020 and November 8, 2021, those ties remain strong.

However, proximity doesn’t always equal easy or convenient access, even for the most privileged of us. FSOs could be forgiven for being lulled into complacency routinely traveling back and forth between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso when it feels like a run across town, only to be slapped with the reality of it actually technically being diplomatic travel to and from your country of assignment across an international border. This is highlighted only when something goes wrong and you realize, this would have been a lot easier were I only driving across town. Here are 10 examples (plus one bonus) of times going across town was more than I bargained for during the last year and a half.

Foreign Service

Your Questions Answered, Volume V

by pennypostcard • November 1, 2020 • 3 Comments

It has been almost five months since the last edition of Your Questions Answered, so I thought I’d share some recent Q&A from the blog’s inbox, edited for length and clarity. In this edition, I’ll address how embassies decide which officers get language training (and how much), length of service vs. number of tours, whether officers serving on the U.S.-Mexico border can live on the U.S. side, and what consular officers do as they advance in their careers.

And as always, please remember these are my unofficial answers derived from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.

Foreign Service, Travel

Spanish (LBQ100): Week 14 Language Immersion in Ecuador, Part I

by pennypostcard • December 22, 2019 • 10 Comments

I flew into Ecuador’s capital, Quito, from Panama City the Saturday before last and immediately could feel I’d arrived somewhere new. The misty mountains ringed the airport and the cool, rainy air felt precariously thin. Quito is a city of 1.9 million people, perched in the Andes on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano, at an incredible elevation of 9,350 feet (2,850 meters). It is the second highest capital city in the world, after La Paz, Bolivia. Previously I think the highest elevation I had ever reached outside an airplane was Denver (around 5,500 feet). Just standing at the baggage claim in Quito, my heart rate was over 120 beats per minute!

My prior travels in Latin America have been limited to Panama (in 2013) and Mexico (too many times to count since 1991), so I was really looking forward to this adventure.

[This is the first blog post in a series of four on my Spanish immersion experience in Ecuador. More posts coming soon!]

Australia, Foreign Service

Happy Birthday, Marines!

by pennypostcard • November 14, 2018 • 3 Comments

Last Friday night, we attended the 243rd United States Marine Corps (USMC) birthday ball at Australian Parliament House. Although I don’t love formal events held at 6pm on work days (especially before a three-day weekend when I have an early flight out of town), we rushed home from work, threw ourselves together, and had a nice time.

Australia, Foreign Service, Travel

Postcard from Gold Coast

by pennypostcard • August 31, 2018 • 3 Comments

This week Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand held a ministerial-level meeting to discuss national security issues in the Australian state of Queensland. It was my first-ever visit to Queensland, and although I had a lot of work to do both as a political reporting officer and as a control officer, my time in Gold Coast exceeded my expectations both for professional development and as a new and beautiful place to visit. If you’re going to be busy, why not be busy with the ocean and sandy beaches less than two blocks away!

Australia, Foreign Service, Travel

Postcard From Melbourne + One Year in Oz

by pennypostcard • August 1, 2018 • 6 Comments

A few weeks ago, I went on a work-related trip to Melbourne, Australia’s second most populous city. Nearly thirteen years had elapsed since my prior visit, but it was evident that Melbourne still has a spirit all its own – it is definitely not Sydney, or Brisbane, or Adelaide, or Perth. Melbourne is one of Australia’s most diverse cities; often called Australia’s “cultural capital,” one-third of Melbourne’s 4.9 million residents were born overseas. Visiting the melting pot that is Melbourne to attend the Strong Cities Network conference on preventing violent extremism, amidst this year’s confluence of global politics, the threat of terrorism, and the halfway point of my tour as a political officer in Canberra, made me reflect on the immigrant experience in Australia and Melbourne’s successes in social cohesion.

Australia, Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Foreign Service Day

by pennypostcard • May 4, 2018 • 1 Comment

In 1996, the United States Senate designated the first Friday in May as “American Foreign Service Day.” It is on this day that members of the Foreign Service around the world come together to recognize the work that our nation’s diplomats do. It is also a day to pay tribute to those we’ve lost; today at high noon, we at U.S. Embassy Canberra gathered at the chancery flagpole for a few moments of reflection and remembrance.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, Uzbekistan

Did I Mention That I’m an Introvert?

by pennypostcard • October 3, 2015 • 2 Comments

It’s been two weeks since we returned from our trip to Samarkand. I am currently working on a half-baked theory that the life of a diplomat is especially suited to extroverts, although according to what I’ve heard and seen, many of us in the State Department (myself included) are in fact introverts.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what an introvert actually is – some people categorize introverts as shy, socially awkward, or bookworms. That may be true in some cases. However, the introversion-extroversion scale is more about where one receives their energy.

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