We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops.

Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too.

I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was actually secure.

Author here. I posted this on Sunday for a light read, but I guess it got traction today.

Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there. While the cookie credentials are pushed aside. I think that's the security theater. We are worried about supposed active shooters, different physical threats while a backdoor to the company is left wide open. The turnstiles are not useless, they give an active record of who is in the building, and stop unauthorized people. But they also give so much comfort that we neglect the other types of threats.

Amazon is pretty serious about physical access security. Even back in 2002, you had to scan your badge while a security guard watches, to check if you are the same person as the badge picture.

The same guard also checked if your dog was registered (I think my dog got a badge with his picture, although I think that was just for fun, and not functional)

And no easy ability to enter through side doors - you couldn't open a side door with your badge. At the time, you could still lurk outside a side door until someone else opens the door to exit. Eventually (11 years later) they locked all the side doors because they noticed people doing this sort of thing.

More recently, I think you have to scan your badge to leave so they can even track how long you're in the building, and know when you're supposed to work on site but you were there only long enough to have a coffee and then went home to continue working from home. This last part is second-hand knowledge since I haven't work there in a long time.

There is nothing here that really tells us the turnstile was security theatre? Or the various key card swipes.

There are many ways to skin a cat; and there are many ways to ensure authenticated / trusted access. If you have site wide security gates, it means you know everyone on site / on a given floor conforms to a given minimal security or trust level, so now you can conduct operations in that area with more freedom. This makes the risk assessments for other actions so much simpler. e.g. Now when the apprentice IT tech leaves the SLT's laptop trolley in the corridor it doesn't trigger a reflash of all of the machines. Or when a key individual misplaces their keyfob (e.g. in the kitchen) it doesn't trigger a lockdown of core systems, because they had it on the way in and its reasonable to trust that nobody stole it.

Obviously the implementation was botched in this case - but "feel secure" and "security theatre" are right as often as they are wrong.

As others have mentioned, it comes down to the threat model, but sometimes the threat model itself is uncomfortable to talk about.

It’s sad to think about, but in my recollection a lot of intra-building badge readers went up in response to the 2018 active shooter situation at the YouTube HQ[1]. In cases like this, the threat model is “confine a hostile person to a specific part of the building once they’ve gotten in while law enforcement arrives,” less than preventing someone from coat tailing their way into the building at all.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16748529

I'm not going to comment on the security implications of either situation, but is there a companion piece by the facilities team complaining about the amount of paperwork required to install turnstiles only for a software engineer to come along and lock them out of Jira on a whim?

Allegations of security theater should start with discussing the threat model. This is just somebody complaining about a crappy key card system.

Bad implementations do not "security theater" make. When I did some work for a large coffee company, they had turnstiles at their building entrances, and I don't remember any lines in the morning. The scan/auth/enter process went about as fast as if there was no turnstile.

I remember when I started at Microsoft decades ago that there were still "old-timers" who were pissy about having to use card keys to enter the building. With that attitude, man, did that ever explain Microsoft application and OS security in the early 2000s.

Electronic audit trail makes SOC2 report easier for auditors. You can use paper trail instead, but electronics makes it easier. Few things in the world are required, but some of these compliance things are 'viral' in that if you're a vendor to a guy who needs compliance you need to practice the standards as well.

Besides, visibility is sufficient as a deterrent. Back in India, there'd be a big difference between leaving an old man in a chair in front of the shop and having exactly zero people in front of the shop. There are classes of people you deter with the former who will not be deterred by the latter. The old man is not 'security' - anyone motivated can shut him up without much effort. And yet his presence works.

This text is another reminder about the fact that as organizations grow, they become more and more dysfunctional. They function despite that, because the economies of scale are apparently still larger than the loss of functionality due to the increased size.

Humans' most important achievement is the ability to create structures larger than the Dunbar number. But this is not achieved for free.

(And this is another reason why I strive to work at startups more than at huge corporations.)

I’ve been to many very large office buildings with turnstile systems, and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the busiest hours. Yes, they are security theater to a large extent, but they do legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot more efficiently.

Whenever I see this in practice I always think a determined killer would clearly know not to attack the “secure” building. Rather, attack the densely-packed line of people waiting to swipe their badges.

Unnervingly, this usually occurs to me when I’m waiting patiently in the densely packed line of fellow targets.

Many years ago I was doing due diligence on a point of sale hardware company, I had to head up to an acquisition they had done. People bitched and moaned about the level of physical security added, and when I asked them why they were so upset, they told me to go to the loading dock in the back.

The loading dock was kept completely open "because it's hot and we don't have A/C back here!".

Those turnstiles were inefficient (slowed legitimate users down), but not security theater (they really blocked unauthorized access.)

Could have been worse. Anybody remember that story where the keycard readers would randomly work and eventually it was discovered the log file had grown huge and was being appended by reading the whole thing into memory over the network, appending the line, and writing the whole thing back out again, thus creating what the random pattern because I guess it would sometimes time out?

Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers in the door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual request (“close the door behind you, this blocking the friendly person trying to go through, so their scan their card”) is genuinely obnoxious. But a turnstile really does fundamentally let one person through, even if it’s easy to bypass.

Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces of the employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he didn't know you you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he did know or by showing your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you, and he also somehow knew when you were no longer with the company.

There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those buildings.

I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but this story made it perfectly clear.

Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would seem to me that within minutes of that queue building up the turnstiles + card system would be disabled because something clearly was not working.

I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes, obviously, you need to implement systems that are secure and performant so that you don't get a backed-up line of people waiting an hour just to get into the office in the morning. But that's a notably flawed rollout; millions of employees go into badge-in-required offices every day without issue. And it's kind of hard to imagine running a large office while lacking such basic physical security as "keep unauthorized people out of the building". Having electronic badges and readers is table stakes.

I feel the same way. Once I worked with junior developer, who was really eager to develop stuff. He was tasked to create a development environment, where we can tests features. Nothing fancy, just some scripts and simple containers.

He used copies of the production database, but forgot to set the admin password. The machine in ec2, public on the internet.

It was fixed few weeks later. But the connection still doesn’t use SSL, sends passwords plain text.

Yeah, he doesn’t really like criticism about his work…

I always think about the phrase:

“Security is our highest priority”

Sure.

Lift (elevator) sidenote: there are fancy well designed ones where the turnstile communicates what floor you need to go to to the lift, and a "destination dispatch" system assigns/batches groups of passengers with similar/same destinations to the same lift car to improve efficiency.

This is the opposite of security theater. It was an apparently an implementation of security with issues but restricting physical access, both for people and vehicles, is absolutely a real improvement to security.

Am I the only one who finds this post weird because this is a solved problem? I've worked for 18 years at companies where everyone had to badge into every building. There have never been lines of people waiting to get in. Once I worked in a 12-story building. Of course, the badging wasn't in the elevators: the elevator lobbies on each floor had doors with badge readers.

The feel of the piece is that the entire effort was misguided, when the real story seems to be, "My company was somehow unable to implement something that every other company does easily."

If you as an employer are not doing physical engineering or working with large or unsafe physical objects, you don't need an office, period. For computer work alone, you don't need an office at all. If you fix the "office theater", the physical security problems disappear.

Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious security and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door. In fact, I can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what happened here.

Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10 floors? That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations have this figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail in Las Vegas for the CES show. No problems for the most part. It would be interesting to know what this company actually installed.

Security theater, perhaps. Don't underestimate the degree to which those turnstiles were intended to serve the purpose of tracking employees' movements.