Schneier on Security

Roger • February 5, 2006 8:49 PM

A few points. First, we see again the too-common problem of blog commenters writing without even reading the linked article. Several of the issues raised are made moot by the facts. In particular:
* The victims didn’t hold the door open out of politeness, the killer took an access card at gunpoint (she did not shoot the person who surrendered the card);
* Half the victims (or more than half, if you don’t include the suicide of the perpetrator) were actually outside, possibly as many as three of them not even in the compound [1];
* Yes, the perpetrator was known to be psychologically disturbed, had several years previously received a medical pension for this reason. She had also once been involuntarily confined to a mental hospital but they found nothing wrong with her and she was almost immediately released; she had no prior history of violence, and at the time of the incident, she was (not very successfully) running a small business. So, we aren’t talking about someone who showed obvious signs of insanity or was living on the streets. There is no regime, pre- or post- Reagan, in which she is likely to have been institutionalised. In fact all published signs of Sanmarco’s insanity concern a persecution complex about people who were, in fact, responsible for her losing her job, so it is arguable whether she was insane at all.

Second, what can we learn from this? The most obvious thing to me is that a lot of simple security mechanisms fall to pieces when you hold a gun to someone’s head. “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent” — yes, because it’s simple and it bloody well works. A variety of measures have been suggested to harden the security at this facility, but the only one that would have been of much benefit to the victims outside the building, might have been an armed guard at the gates. Even then, it is revealed that many of the employees took their meals together at nearby restaurants, so the killer could have just waited for mealtimes.

Still, a human guard, armed or otherwise, and either watching the gate or able to see CCTV coverage of the gate or parking lot, could perhaps have given other workers more warning, or perhaps even remotely disabled the access card reader at the front door. (This might have been fatal to the worker who gave Sanmarco the card, but saved the 3 killed inside. Assuming the door could not be opened by pistol fire.)

As Bruce points out, such rampages are very rare, and it probably is not practicable to base security provisions around them. However, most of the security measures that might protect against this sort of attack are also those that might protect against armed robbery. I do find it curious that the US Postal Service apparently thinks that mail sorting facilities are unlikely to be targeted in armed robberies.

Finally, a small aside: looking at a list of these “postal” shootings (linked in a comment above), it appears that in several cases, the killer slew one other person outside the workplace immediately before attacking the workplace. In the all of those cases, that first victim was an older woman. In this case the killer also killed an older woman at another location before attacking the former workplace. Might be interesting for the psychological profilers.

1. It is not mentioned in the linked article, but the wounded woman, Charlotte Colton, has since died from her wounds, while an additional shooting victim was discovered several miles away in her own home. This latter victim had apparently been Sanmarco’s landlady at the time when she was still working for the postal service. The total death toll is now 8 including the perpetrator, of which 1 victim was found just inside the facility door, 2 victims and the perpetrator were well inside the postal building, 1 victim was in the parking lot, 2 more were either in the parking lot or just outside the compound (there are conflicting reports), and one victim was found several miles away.

Roger • February 6, 2006 8:06 PM

@Davi:
== Threats vs. vulnerabilities ==
You make a good point about distinguishing between threat reduction and vulnerability reduction. My main point in regard to vulnerability reduction was that armed robbery is presumably a significant threat for postal facilities, and they had almost no defenses against armed robbery, either. The ought to have, and if they had done so, those defenses would have partially overlapped with ones for this type of (much lower threat) attack, and probably some of the dead would have survived.

I do not think that at present you are going to get very far with USPS management reducing the threat of such attacks because their present position is (rather emphatically) that the threat is already extremely low. Further, some associations of former employees who say that there is a problem, say that the problem is USPS management culture, which is abusive to the rank-and-file, and allegedly includes — get this! — systematic use of false claims of mental illness against employees who try to stand up for their rights.

“The workplace is likely to remain vulnerable to armed attack, but unstable and violent attackers probably can be stopped/helped long before they become a credible threat.”
AND
“I was just trying to call out the fact that finding a countermeasure / control for the threat is as appropriate, if not more, than for the vulnerability. From an economic standpoint, as many others have stated above, the vast majority of workplaces in America are unlikely to try and reduce the vulnerability to armed vengenance attacks by insiders — it’s obviously cost prohibitive unless the threat is under [out of? — Roger] control.”

I’m afraid I take quite the opposite view here. While the workplace cannot be made totally invulnerable to armed attack, there are many simple measures which would greatly reduce the vulnerability, and in particular reduce loss of life in the event of an attack. Furthermore as I pointed out the cost/threat ratio is mitigated by the fact that most of these measures also protect against much high threat problems, such as robbery and civil disturbances. On the other hand, reliably identifying and helping potential violent attackers is a profoundly difficult problem. It certainly merits research but I would not expect to see any effective solutions arising any time soon.

In a sense, concentrating on threat reduction for armed robberies (“don’t keep cash on the premises”) has enabled employers to avoid investment in actual protections (e.g. solid doors, good locks, door bars, peepholes or CCTV, alternate escape routes) and thus increased the hazard of the rarer armed violence scenarios (psychotic episodes, marital violence, abductions, civil disorder, etc.)

== Psychiatry ==
Disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist!

“That makes no sense. First you say she was involuntarily confined, then you say there is no health-care system that would institutionalize her.”

It makes perfect sense. It means that someone recommended she be confined (on what basis we have no idea), and after psychiatric examination it was found that this was unwarranted, and she was released. Note that unwarranted involuntary psychiatric confinement is a terrible thing to do to a person, and they are quite appropriately very cautious with agreeing to it.

“Seems to me that a health-care system that is functioning might have in fact helped her, rather than finding nothing wrong.”

To be clear: I am NOT claiming that there are no problems with the current state of the mental health system, either in your country or in mine (which decided to copy your experiment after seeing how disastrously it went). What I am saying is that Sanmarco DID receive the attentions of psychiatrists and they did not find any reason for involuntary confinement. This is not surprising, as the capacity of psychiatry to predict future mental illness is still very limited.

“”it is arguable whether she was insane at all””
“What?! You consider suicide vengeance shootings related to job loss arguably “sane” behavior?”

Umm, potentially, yes. Stephen later suggested that I meant “legally sane”, but actually I did mean psychiatrically sane in that — on the basis of the evidence before us at that point — it was arguable whether she was suffering from any disorder classed as a mental disorder under DSM-IV, possibly excepting the controversial category of personality disorders. (That she was legally sane I think is practically a given.) I do not claim she was sane, but that the evidence of her being afflicted by anything more than rage is weak. (Apparently some psychiatrists have regarded rage significant enough to motivate a crime as necessarily being a personality disorder and hence a mental disorder, however this view is very controversial and the authors of the DSM admit it has no scientific basis.)

Now, the NYT article you found changes that perspective somewhat, but is not at all a clincher; the only items that are sourced are that Sanmarco would pray audibly in public places, that she believed her deceased relatives were “with her”, that she would stare at Sonya Salazar (an employee in the local government), and that she became irate at the local government’s repeated thwarting of her business plans. This is remarkably weak stuff; if we institutionalised everyone who believes deceased relatives can hear their prayers you would need capacity for about 1,000 million inmates, while institutionalising anyone who gets annoyed at petty bureaucrats would leave no-one at all.

Some of the other claims are a little more sensational, but they are unsourced rumours: hardly surprising in a small town with a famous murderer, and no doubt droves of journalists roaming the streets. Even then, only one item (car park nudity) clearly tips the scales between eccentric ideation and illness.

“And the last USPS slaying apparently ended up with the killer (Maceo Yarbough III) found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.”

Out of the incidents on the wikipedia list (which however appears to be incomplete), Yarbough was the only one found not guilty by reason of insanity. All the rest either committed suicide or were convicted and received stiff sentences. Yarbough’s case also does not particularly fit the “going postal” profile: he was a recent, temporary employee with no disputes with management who killed one co-worker peer in an argument and then fled. Strangely, while he was awaiting trial his father, Maceo Yarbough II, was also murdered. Incidentally, Yarbough is also NOT the last “going postal” incident before Sanmarco; there were at least two subsequent incidents which were not on USPS premises, and resulted in serious woundings but no deaths.