Entries Tagged "physical security"

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Little People Hiding in Luggage

This is both clever and very weird:

Swedish police are quizzing “people of limited stature” with criminal records following a spate of robberies from the cargo holds of coaches – possibly carried out by dwarves smuggled onboard in sports bags.

[…]

National coach operator Swebus confirmed it’d been hit by the audacious crims, who have over the last few months has lifted “thousands of pounds” in cash, jewellery and other valuables.

The company’s sales manager, Ingvar Ryggasjo, said that one short person had been put aboard a coach in a hockey bag. A female passenger said she’d seen some men squeezing the “large, heavy bag” into the cargo hold, and that she later found she’d been relieved of stuff including a camera and purse.

Posted on February 4, 2008 at 1:19 PM • View Comments

Security vs. Privacy

If there’s a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it’s security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It’s the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.

In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all—that’s right, all—internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word “Orwellian” feels too mild.

The article (now online here) contains this passage:

In order for cyberspace to be policed, internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'”

I’m sure they have that saying in their business. And it’s precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it’s true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.

We’ve been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often—in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric—that most of us don’t even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it’s a false one.

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it’s based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and—possibly—sky marshals. Everything else—all the security measures that affect privacy—is just security theater and a waste of effort.

By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing—national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on—do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.

The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who—presumably—get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.

It should be no surprise that people choose security over privacy: 51 to 29 percent in a recent poll. Even if you don’t subscribe to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s obvious that security is more important. Security is vital to survival, not just of people but of every living thing. Privacy is unique to humans, but it’s a social need. It’s vital to personal dignity, to family life, to society—to what makes us uniquely human—but not to survival.

If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy—especially if you scare them first. But it’s still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” It’s also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on January 29, 2008 at 5:21 AM • View Comments

Consumer Reports on Aviation Security and the TSA

It’s not on their website yet, and you’d have to pay to read it in any case, but the February 2008 issue of Consumer Reports has an article on aviation security. Much of it you’ve all heard before, but there are some new bits:

Larry Tortorich, a TSA training officer and former representative to the Joint Terrorism Task Force who retired in 2006, also says he saw problems from the inside. “There was a facade of security. There were numerous security flaws and vulnerabilities I identified. The response was, it wasn’t apparent to the public, so there would not be any corrective action.”

I’ve regularly pointed to reinforcing the cockpit doors as something that was a good idea, and should have been done years earlier.

Critics, however, say a stronger door is only half of the solution. “People have this illusion that hardened cockpit doors work, and they don’t,” Dzakovic says. “If you want to have a secure door, you need to have a double hulled door.”

Consumer Reports searched NAS, the Aviation Safety Reporting System, and found 51 incidents since April 2002 in which flight crews reported problems with the hardened doors.

Most of them weren’t really security issues: locking mechanisms failing, doors popping open in flight, and so on. But this was more interesting:

A 2006 study of aviation security by DFI International, a Washington, D.C. security consultancy, found that a drunken passenger kicked a hole in a door panel and that aircraft cleaners “broke a fortified door off its hinges by running a heavy snack cart into it on a bet.”

El Al, of course, has double doors. But since the cost is between $5K and $10K per aircraft, the airline industry has fought the measure in the U.S.

The article also talks about how poor the screeners actually are, but I’ve covered all that already.

Posted on January 10, 2008 at 1:58 PM • View Comments

Picasso Stolen from Brazilian Museum

A professional job:

The thieves used a hydraulic car jack to pry their way past the pull-down metal gate that protects the museum’s front entrance. Then, they smashed through two glass doors, probably using a crowbar, to get to the paintings on the second floor, police said.

The fundamental problem with securing fine art is that it’s so extraordinarily valuable; museums simply can’t afford the security required.

Local media reports estimated their value at around $100 million, but Cosomano and other curators said it is difficult to put a price on them because the paintings had not gone to auction.

“The prices paid for such works would be incalculable, enough to give you vertigo,” said curator Miriam Alzuri of the Bellas Artes Museum of Bilbao, Spain.

We basically rely on the fact that fine art can’t be resold, because everyone knows it’s stolen. But if someone wants the painting and is willing to hang it in a secret room somewhere in his estate, that doesn’t hold.

“Everything indicates they were sent to do it by some wealthy art lover for his own collection—someone who, although wealthy, was not rich enough to buy the paintings,” Moura added.

Posted on December 27, 2007 at 1:41 PM • View Comments

Prison Break

Details:

Police said Espinosa and Blunt were in adjacent cells and used a long metal wire to scrape away mortar around the cinder block between their cells and the outer wall in Espinosa’s cell.

Once the cement block between the cells was removed, they smashed the block and hid the pieces in a footlocker. According to police, Blunt, who is 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 210 pounds, squeezed into Espinosa’s cell through an approximately 16- to 18-inch hole.

The two inmates wiggled through another 18-inch hole in the outer wall. From a roof landing, the two men “took a running jump or they were standing and they jumped approximately 15 feet out and about 30 feet down,” Romankow said.

Then they jumped a razor-wire fence onto a New Jersey transit railroad bed to freedom, police said. Authorities found two sets of footprints in the snow heading in opposite directions.

[…]

To delay discovery of the escape, Espinosa and Blunt used dummies made of sheets and pillows in their beds. They also hung photographs of bikini-clad women to hide the holes in the walls, a move reminiscent of a scene in the Hollywood hit “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Posted on December 19, 2007 at 5:10 AM • View Comments

British Nuclear Security Kind of Slipshod

No two-person control or complicated safety features: until 1998, you could arm British nukes with a bicycle lock key.

To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws—like a battery cover on a radio—using a thumbnail or a coin.

Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.

The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.

Certainly most of the security was procedural. But still….

Posted on November 21, 2007 at 12:50 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.