Diversions: "Secure Premises"

by Michael Finley
Computer User

Copyright © 2001 by Michael Finley

A friend who works at a regional government service center told me this tale of security run amok.

He does number crunching for a federal agency, and for years it's been a dull but friendly place to work. People showed up every morning, drifted to their desks, pried open their eyelids, booted up their workstations and commenced to crunch.

Then a bomb went off in Oklahoma City. It was very serious, and very bad all by itself. But the explosion send repercussions to this federal office a thousand miles away.

A security consulting team was called in, and one specialist after another determined that:

§         the building was not set far enough away from the street to withstand a car bomb;

§         people came and went in the building as lackadaisically, without passing any kind of checkpoint, like the place was some sort of cinema multiplex;

§         computer security was woefully inadequate. Half the people used no password, and no one used encryption, and the firewall around the agency Intranet was about as impermeable as a slice of Velveeta.

Suddenly, this sleepy agency, which was too broke to upgrade its four-year old fleet of Pentium PCs, had money to burn, provided the expenditure was security-related.

The first sign of improvement was that the door on the parking lot side of the building was permanently sealed, so as to limit access to the building's atrium, on the other side. The nearest forty parking spaces were walled off.

Then a security desk was installed, with two full-time uniformed guards and a walk-thru metal detector and conveyor-belt bag X-rayer. Workers who used to park fifty feet from the door now park a minimum of 120 yards from the building, which they now to walk around, even in below zero wind-chills, in the name of safety.

And then there is the logjam at the checkout desk. At 8 AM, people line up thirty deep to be let in. Checkpoint Charlie, where East Berlin met West Berlin, was not so fortified or so forbidding. The two guards -- a man of about 240 pounds who looks like he played middle linebacker, and a petite woman with a lovely smile and a loaded Smith & Wesson 38 on the shelf next to her lunch bag -- sit smugly behind a shield of bulletproof glass ten inches high.

To shoot them -- well, you would have to be five feet tall in your tippytoes to fire over that glass. And hope she grabs her sandwich instead of the gun.

It gets worse. Once you are inside the building proper, there is relatively free access -- except for the fourth floor, where the servers and telecommunications hardware is. You cannot get off the elevator onto this floor unless you flash a smartcard by a laser reader mounted on the door. 

Once you are at your desk, you must enter your password, and if you leave your desk for more than 10 minutes and return, you must enter it again. And the password can’t be your birthday or pet's name. And you can’t cut-and-paste it from memory.

And it has to be a case-sensitive combination of 12 alphabetical and numerical characters that are reassigned on a monthly basis by the network administrator. Who spends the first hour and a half of every day going around to workers explaining that the reason they cannot log on and get to work is that the mistook a lower-case L (ell) for the figure 1 (one).

The system has been in place for nearly two years now, and the results are impressive. Office productivity has fallen about 20 percent. Employee retention is a dreadful 64 percent annually -- 53 percent on the fourth floor.

People are sick a lot, they grumble a lot, and they feel they are just not working in a very friendly place any more. A few people, the kind that you might worry about in a crisis, are just plain scared. All that security has convinced them that swarthy-complected terrorists with a three-days growth of facial hair have the data processing facility squarely in their crosshairs.

The reason I know about this is because I just spent a couple of hours listening to my friend, an actuary -- he says he just didn't have the personality for accountancy -- pour out his heart on the topic, over a bottle of red wine, as the sun set over the apple trees in his back yard.

"If you want to bring the government to its knees," he said wistfully, "you don’t have to blow a building up. Just make it really, really safe."

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