Breaking into a Garage
In seconds.
Garage doors with automatic openers have always seemed like a lot of security theater to me.
Entries Tagged "physical security"
Page 9 of 24
Protecting Cars with The Club
From the Freakonomics blog:
At some point, the Club was mentioned. The professional thieves laughed and exchanged knowing glances. What we knew was that the Club is a hardened steel device that attaches to the steering wheel and the brake pedal to prevent steering and/or braking. What we found out was that a pro thief would carry a short piece of a hacksaw blade to cut through the plastic steering wheel in a couple seconds. They were then able to release The Club and use it to apply a huge amount of torque to the steering wheel and break the lock on the steering column (which most cars were already equipped with). The pro thieves actually sought out cars with The Club on them because they didn’t want to carry a long pry bar that was too hard to conceal.
Canada Spending $1B on Security for G8/G20 Summit in June
The Canadian government disclosed Tuesday that the total price tag to police the elite Group of Eight meeting in Muskoka, as well as the bigger-tent Group of 20 summit starting a day later in downtown Toronto, has already climbed to more than $833-million. It said it’s preparing to spend up to $930-million for the three days of meetings that start June 25.
That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.
These numbers are crazy. There simply isn’t any justification for this kind of spending.
By comparison, the estimated total cost of security for the 17-day 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver was just over $898-million.
Think of all the actual security you can buy for that money.
EDITED TO ADD (6/12): Two links detailing how the money was probably spent. Pittsburgh’s cost, less than a year before, was estimated at $18 million.
EDITED TO ADD (6/28): The total seems to be $1.2B. I haven’t found any breakdown of the spending that differentiates between operational costs and capital improvements. If, for example, the Toronto police all got new radios out of this budget, those radios will continue to provide benefits for the city of Toronto long after the summit. On the other hand, money spent on extra security guards for the week provides no ongoing benefit.
My best quote to the media: “If it really costs this much to secure a meeting of the world’s leaders, maybe they should try video conferencing.”
Biometric Wallet
Cool idea, or dumb idea?
Its features include:
- Fingerprint access only
- Bluetooth enabled for notification alerts—automated notification via bluetooth if your wallet strays more than 10 feet from your body
- Protected against RFID electronic theft—the case shields all contents from RFID scanners
Preventing Terrorist Attacks in Crowded Areas
On the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, I—along with several other people—was asked about how to prevent terrorist attacks in crowded areas. This is my response.
In the wake of Saturday’s failed Times Square car bombing, it’s natural to ask how we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. The answer is stop focusing on the specifics of what actually happened, and instead think about the threat in general.
Think about the security measures commonly proposed. Cameras won’t help. They don’t prevent terrorist attacks, and their forensic value after the fact is minimal. In the Times Square case, surely there’s enough other evidence—the car’s identification number, the auto body shop the stolen license plates came from, the name of the fertilizer store—to identify the guy. We will almost certainly not need the camera footage. The images released so far, like the images in so many other terrorist attacks, may make for exciting television, but their value to law enforcement officers is limited.
Check points won’t help, either. You can’t check everybody and everything. There are too many people to check, and too many train stations, buses, theaters, department stores and other places where people congregate. Patrolling guards, bomb-sniffing dogs, chemical and biological weapons detectors: they all suffer from similar problems. In general, focusing on specific tactics or defending specific targets doesn’t make sense. They’re inflexible; possibly effective if you guess the plot correctly, but completely ineffective if you don’t. At best, the countermeasures just force the terrorists to make minor changes in their tactic and target.
It’s much smarter to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on measures that don’t focus on the specific. It’s more efficient to spend money on investigating and stopping terrorist attacks before they happen, and responding effectively to any that occur. This approach works because it’s flexible and adaptive; it’s effective regardless of what the bad guys are planning for next time.
After the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt, I was asked how we can better protect our airplanes from terrorist attacks. I pointed out that the event was a security success—the plane landed safely, nobody was hurt, a terrorist was in custody—and that the next attack would probably have nothing to do with explosive underwear. After the Moscow subway bombing, I wrote that overly specific security countermeasures like subway cameras and sensors were a waste of money.
Now we have a failed car bombing in Times Square. We can’t protect against the next imagined movie-plot threat. Isn’t it time to recognize that the bad guys are flexible and adaptive, and that we need the same quality in our countermeasures?
I know, nothing I haven’t said many times before.
Steven Simon likes cameras, although his arguments are more movie-plot than real. Michael Black, Noah Shachtman, Michael Tarr, and Jeffrey Rosen all write about the limitations of security cameras. Paul Ekman wants more people. And Richard Clarke has a nice essay about how we shouldn’t panic.
Security Fog
An odd burglary prevention tool:
If a burglar breaks in, the system floods the business with a dense fog similar to what’s used in theaters and nightclubs. An intense strobe light blinds and disorients the crook.
[..]
Mazrouei said the cost to install the system starts at around $3,000.
Police point out that the system blinds interior security cameras as well as criminals. Officers who respond to a burglary also will not enter a building when they can’t see who’s inside. Local firefighters must be informed so they don’t mistake the fog for smoke.
EDITED TO ADD (4/21): I blogged about the same thing in 2007, though that version was marketed to homeowners. It’s interesting how much more negative my reaction is to fog as a home security device than as a security device to protect retail stock.
Master Thief
The amazing story of Gerald Blanchard.
Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend’s nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.
As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.
From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.
Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.
Acrobatic Thieves
Some movie-plot attacks actually happen:
They never touched the floor—that would have set off an alarm.
They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.
And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in—down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.
USB Combination Lock
Here’s a promotional security product designed by someone who knows nothing about security. The USB drive is “protected” by a combination lock. There are only two dials, so there are only 100 possible combinations. And when the drive is “locked” and the connector is retracted, the contact are still accessible.
Maybe it should be given away by companies that sell security theater.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.