"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense." These very powerful words were mandated in 1966 by the United States Supreme Court (384 U.S. 436). In...

I'm sure every security executive out there knows of at least a few people in their organization who are just plain terrible at protecting themselves – they fall for phishing scams and give out personal tidbits like moms giving out candy on Halloween. They are either ignorant of the risks and the security procedures to mitigate them, or they just don't care.   For many, the way to deal with...

If a proposed contract for New York City hotel staffers is approved, personal panic alarms (panic buttons) would be part of a measure to improve safety for those staff members . The proposal between the Hotel Association of New York (the association of hotel owners) and the New York Hotel Trades Council AFL CIO (the union of hotel workers) specifies "devices to be carried on their persons at...

Phones enabled with wireless Near Field Communications (NFC) technology are already gaining speed in the marketplace as access control and other platforms utilize its advantages for mainstream deployment. Here’s what Raj Venkat, vice president of Marketing for Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, Carmel, Ind., had to say on the topic. “Near-Field Communication, or NFC, provides simplified...

Women of the Year awards—call for nominations The Women’s Security Council’s (WSC) Women of the Year Awards deadline has been extended until January 31, 2012. Nominate your colleague today!! There is no cost to enter. The WSC Women of the Year Award recipients will be honored during ISC West 2012 in Las Vegas at WSC’s Awards Reception, profiled in the special April 2012 eWSC awards...

Over the past several weeks, SIW has extensively covered retail security in the wake of this year’s Black Friday sales. The behavior of shoppers during these sales events has become even more abhorrent in recent years, but what we’ve discovered is that while some incidents that occur inside stores grab most of the headlines, in reality, many of the most dangerous crimes occur in store...

Much like the coaching staffs he is charged to protect, New Orleans deputy mayor Lt. Colonel Jerry Sneed, USMC retired, says that good game preparation is the key to success. Speaking as a keynote at the second annual National Sports Safety and Security conference, Sneed, who became New Orleans' first director of Office of Emergency Preparedness and director of Homeland Security following the...

I originally posted this February 8, 2009 on my Microsoft blog and thought I should share it here. I really became interested in RFID after reading RFID Toys back in 2002. Amal Graafstra the author and I have been friends ever since, though Amal travels constantly to work with clients both nationally and internationally. The thing that really caught my attention was the RFID chips that Amal...

This is my first blog posting ever. For those of you who don't know me, I am a lawyer specializing in the electronic security and life safety industries. You can check me out on my law firm's web page . My practice is devoted to representing electronic security and life safety providers coast-to-coast. Since I started out as an industry lawyer defending an alarm company in a multiple...

 Storage is a big part of IP video security and so I thought I would start a small series of video storage starting with the basics.  Today we will discuss RAID.  RAID has been discussed many (x4) times throughout the years but I still get questions about it.  What is it, what is the best choice for RAID for my VMS, etc.  So here we go. There are 4 major types of RAID 0, 1, 5...

Recently, following on New York City Transit’s theme, See Something, Say Something, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the kickoff of a broader federal program to enlist the public in helping to identify suspicious people and events to provide another barrier to terrorism and other criminal activity on public transportation. She made the announcement in New York’s Penn Station, the...