Presence is the defence
There's a new SBS drama out tonight called The Airport Chaplain, starring Hugo Weaving, based loosely on a real person I've worked alongside. The amount of press it's generated has got me thinking about why that particular job, in that particular place, makes for such a compelling premise.
An airport is a specific kind of human environment. People aren't there just to be there - they're passing through, managing logistics, keeping track of children, double-checking documents, wondering if they packed the right stuff. Attention is divided almost by design. And that, it turns out, is enough.
In the lost and found work I do at the airport, the story behind almost every item is practically the same. Not negligence, not carelessness in any meaningful sense - just a moment where something else demanded attention first. A kid. A boarding gate change. A passport that needed to be back in the bag. The item was there, and then it wasn't, and the person often doesn't realise for another twenty minutes.
Distraction is the attack surface. Not stupidity, not recklessness - just the ordinary human condition of having more than one thing to attend to at once.
This is true online too. The scam doesn't work because the victim is naive. It works because they're tired, or hopeful, or moving quickly, or emotionally invested in something that felt real. The phishing email lands because the visual cues are close enough and attention was elsewhere for a second. The romance scam succeeds because loneliness is a powerful distraction from scepticism.
Which brings me back to the chaplain. And to the idea that the human isn't always the weakest link - sometimes they're the only link that matters.
What strikes me about the airport environment - and what I suspect makes The Airport Chaplain work as a premise - is that it's a place where the official systems are extensive and the human layer is still indispensable. There are cameras everywhere. There are protocols for everything. And yet the moment that actually matters, the moment where something goes wrong or someone needs help, very often involves a person noticing something that the system didn't flag.
The lost property process is a good example. The system - the database, the categorisation, the storage - exists to reunite people with their belongings. But the system doesn't find the item. A person finds it and hands it in. A person recognises that the distressed woman at the information desk is probably looking for the bag that came in an hour ago. A person makes the call that connects those two things. The system facilitates; the human perceives.
I've spoken to victims of scams - romance scams, delivery scams, elaborate constructions that have taken months to build. These aren't people who weren't paying attention. They were paying attention to the wrong thing, because something had successfully redirected their focus. A relationship that felt real. A package they genuinely ordered. The scam doesn't create inattention - it exploits the inattention that ordinary life generates naturally.
And what identifies it, more often than not, is another human. Not a system. Someone who has seen enough of the pattern to recognise it, who is present enough to notice that something doesn't add up, who has the kind of contextual awareness that only comes from being embedded in a place over time.
That's the chaplain's particular skill, I think - and it’s one that doesn’t have to be unique to the role, or to any faith tradition. It's a human one. Being present. Knowing what the scene is supposed to look like. Noticing the deviation. Not because an algorithm flagged it, but because something felt off and that feeling was worth acting on.
In security we spend a lot of time thinking about systems - firewalls, authentication, monitoring tools, detection rules. These things matter enormously. But they work on what they've been configured to look for. The human layer works on everything else. On context. On pattern. On the thing that's hard to articulate but impossible to ignore once you've seen enough of it (like the door-person in my previous blog post).
Distraction is the attack surface. Presence is the defence. And presence - genuine, attentive, contextually aware presence - is something you can't automate.
Maybe that's why a show about an airport chaplain has sparked the interest of so many before it’s even been released. It's not really about airports, or chaplains, or even faith. It's about what it means to actually pay attention, in a world that's designed to divide it.