July 2009

THE WANTED — NEW TV SHOW ILLUSTRATES THE CONCEPT OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Posted on July 21, 2009 3:20 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then this new TV show “The Wanted” is worth about a million words!

The debut of “The Wanted” showed the terrorist-fighting journalists meeting with the Norwegian government to find out how to get a Jihad-loving Mullah deported back to Iraq to face charges for murder. The interesting twist of this series is that it shows the journalists meeting with, and clearly identifying, the woman and agency in Norway that is protecting the mullah. They go on to meet with other politicians in Norway and step through all the red tape to find out — what is required to get this terrorist out of Norway and to Iraq to face charges.

Their actions have already set a chain of events in motion including having Iraqi officials say they will not give the Mullah the death penalty, which is apparently what Norway wanted to hear. But even after that concession was made, the person directly in charge of having him deported, was still denying that he would be sent back.

Enter accountability! One TV show with the individuals picture on it — and the bureaucracy is exposed and now action takes place and spurs other actions.

It reminded me of the power of having individuals names linked to their truthful answers about how well or poorly they were complying with specific security requirements. You can talk about high, medium, and low until your face turns blue, but it just theoretical talk — until you actually show real names, with real answers and then it becomes REAL. It becomes actionable intelligence that is much much harder to ignore or push away, out of your consciousness.

I have never discussed a TV show before — but you should check out THE WANTED and see how it focuses the white light of accountability on everyone who is interviewed!! Monday nights on Dateline — catch it.

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Hotel Bombing in Jakarta – A Dangerous Trend

Posted on July 18, 2009 6:46 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

The hotel bombings yesterday were a bad sign. According to an article this morning in USA TODAY, both hotels had been assessed by iJet, a security and intelligence company based in Annapolis, and had received high ratings, said iJet president Bruce McIndoe. The fact that Friday’s blast didn’t do more damage shows those measures were effective, McIndoe said.

“(With) the new security procedures, all they could do is get suicide bombers in and blow out some windows,” he said. “You can’t stop it — there’s no 100% foolproof way. But they’ve minimized the impact. It was a fairly sophisticated operation. (The terrorists) put a lot of time and effort into this, with very little outcome (in terms of ) death and destruction.”

McIndoe is correct that there wasn’t a catastrophic loss of life in these bombings and the damage was relatively minimal. I started to review some of my hotel experiences and see how much security COULD you put into an international business hotel. If the bombers took the bombs right up their rooms in their suitcases — there are a couple of obvious next steps.

1. All luggage gets turned over to hotel staff at the curb, or entry area, and
then is screened in an anteroom before it is taken up to the room by the hotel security staff. That seems to be a relatively easy program to implement, and would dramatically improve security.

2. Bring in the x-ray scanners and all visitors go thru the metal detector and have luggage, briefcases and shopping bags inspected upon entering the hotel. This would be more expensive and intrusive, but probably more effective and just one more travel inconvenience to get used to.

We have a model developed for hotel and casino security. The hotel/hospitality model is a little more complicated than your average business facility because it has more than one purpose. What I mean is that a business is usually set up to conduct business — but a hotel/casino has several lines of business including overnight room business; gambling; shops; restaurant business and also meeting business. All these have different objectives and they are influence the other business lines.

The maids, maintenance personnel, engineers, waitresses, cooks, etc., are all local elements that could potentially be used to gain access for terrorism purposes. Everyone has a cousin somewhere that may use family ties to get access to even a secure facility. The stowaways that get into ships, are almost always the result of the exploitation of family ties.

Better background checks conducted on hotel personnel may be another area that needs work, and would probably improve the hotel’s bottom line because other areas such as cash-handling and letting friends access empty rooms could also be improved at the same time.

Having stricter access controls and luggage/package controls at hotels would just extend the aggravation of current airport security programs right to your next hotel. Let’s hope it doesn’t come too soon.

Categories:
Corporate Security
Facilities Security

How much does Accountability contribute to the Security Environment in an Organization?

Posted on July 17, 2009 2:01 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Watching the Supreme Court confirmation hearings made me think about:

ACCOUNTABILITY. One of the problems faced by security directors in both IT and corporate security is that they are alone on the island. No one else wants to worry or think about security.

This may be a major underlying cause of why security problems are not easily solved, just by adding new technology. People still find ways to either ignore controls, or use them incorrectly.

One of the main benefits of a Distributed Risk Assessment is that it touches different people in the organization and increases their awareness – AND Accountability. The accountability element comes in because the risk assessment analyst can track each individuals answers so you can see a simple profile for each one, and see that they are either:

Complying MORE than others in the organization
Complying SIGNIFANTLY LESS than others in the organization
Are so clueless that they don’t know whether they are compliant or not.
Don’t think the security questions apply to them.

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With this kind of detail, you can also COMPARE individuals, compare business units, compare departments and this kind of detail also encourages accountability in the business unit manager.

Accountability could be the basis for fixing everything that is wrong in society, as well as in the security program.

Think about the impact if everyone took responsibility for their OWN health. It would change the world. What about if everyone took responsibility for their neighborhood’s safety and security? What if parents took responsibility for how their children performed in school?

Obviously – adding the element of Accountability into the security program could be very motivating.

Accountability is the exact opposite of passing the buck to someone else. And while accountability can be a daunting prospect (when you think about applying it in YOUR organization) — it is also empowering. It gives individuals control over their security and takes them from a passive to an active state.

And I hope everyone would prefer being in an active state!!

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