The big ASIS International trade show in Las Vegas September 24-27 represents a one-stop occasion for surveying the latest in security and facility protection products. PRO Barrier will be featuring the K4-rated LightFoot, a lighter version of our K12 Arrestor, the Gater and SpyderWeb barriers and our B-Cube bollards, and discussing the applications of each […]
You can’t count on signs to keep people from acting in ways that challenge security – like doing dangerous things. Take the Criminal Justice Center on 11th Street in Austin, Texas, where a sign reads: “Carrying a deadly weapon on your person, including a licensed concealed handgun, is prohibited” (and will result in prosecution). Quoting […]
The costs of security hindsight can be enormous, amply justifying far smaller expenditures made in foresight. An example is a new University of Southern California report on the most likely outcome of another terrorist attack on U.S. commercial aviation – costs of as much as $420 billion. The report, “The Economic Impacts of a Terrorist […]
Advances in electronic security techology – especially the switch from analog to digital video cameras – are marvelous and impressive, but they tend to produce a one-dimensional view of security: If you can see it you can stop it. That’s not always the case. For example, the cover story in the August issue of Today’s […]
A report bound to draw a lot of interest comes from the New York Police Department – entitled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat”. The report, advises The Los Angeles Times, supports concerns that “After more than a decade of warning that the greatest threat of homegrown terrorism for the United States came from […]
Richard Bejtlich’s TaoSecurity blog has a good entry on the economics of protective products like vehicle access control barriers that seldom are called into play. Determining the rate of return (ROI) on protective devices, Bejtlich writes, is not an exercise in wealth creation but wealth preservation. Security is a savings function, not a wealth ceation […]
We’re indebted today to a couple of web security gurus for providing some humorous moments about innate, often unrecognized, attitude blinders that get in the way of optimum security. Learning with a smile, let’s say. Bruce Schneier points us to Jutta Matt Degener’s and Matt Blaze’s Security Bingo cards. The cards – with such squares […]
For a gripping account of the aftermath of a horrendous event, read a report on the Minneapolis bridge collapse by James Farstad, the city’s prinicipal consultant on broadband-wireless implementation. What occurred following the buckling of the I-35W bridge can be taken as a marker for other possible dire breaches of public safety and security. Farstad’s […]
A primer on municipal security systems – focused on closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) – is offered by SecurityInfoWatch. Reasons for, and applications of, the spreading use of CCTV in U.S. cities are given in the piece by Mariann McDonagh, executive vice president of global marketing for video surveillance solutions and analytics of Verint Systems. […]
Security, of course, reaches beyond barriers, cameras, locks and fences. In fact, it starts behind them, not out front. The Internal Revenue Service might be reflecting on this truism in the wake of a report by its inspector general warning that 61 of 102 employees gave their computer user names and passwords in response to […]