The security week that was: 09/05/08

When cities legislate surveillance

City surveillance requirements of private businesses is the topic I want to address today, and the concern is based off a news story we've been following out of Broward County, Fla. (this is the county where Fort Lauderdale is located). The county is pushing a potential ordinance to require retail businesses use CCTV for their parking lots.

First off, when I hear of this kind of ordinance, I initially think, wow, that would be a boost for our industry. I can just picture all of the area installers getting the calls from retailers who are frantically trying to meet the law's requirement ... if it passes. But here's the other side of the equation: Cheap, do-it-yourself systems coming in just to meet basic requirements with no real security improvement.

We've written before about how municipalities have required surveillance, and some have even lightly specified details on the types of cameras, how long video must be saved, how it must be saved, and more. Obviously, those rules have inherent troubles. As we all know, what works for one location won't necessarily work for all locations -- if that was the case, each vendor would only offer one camera, one DVR and our industry's tradeshows would be utterly boring.

When city officials start specifying security, we get into a tough spot. The Broward County ordinance would require that "any stand-alone drugstore and any shopping center of at least 25,000 square feet to have a camera system that covers their entire parking lot. The parking lot would have to be lit, the recordings saved for a month and the systems installed within the next 180 days."

Read that again if you want; the entire parking lot has to be covered by surveillance. Would anyone venture to guess how difficult that is to do even in a remotely cost-effective manner. Even if you have the highest resolution camera that a retailer could afford, you're still going to have parts of a parking lot that don't have as much light and are so far away from the camera that any criminal act captured would hardly be court-worthy evidence. And this doesn't even get into the cost of wiring cameras further out in a parking lot, and installing light poles and power. How deep are your retail customers' pockets anyway? I've heard time-and-time again from dealers who say that retailers are leery to spend money on security upgrades at a time when their industry is suffering from fewer purchases and higher costs of goods.

Business owners in the area are currently voicing concerns over this proposed law, and I would suggest that local integrators and security dealers get closely involved in this kind of rule-making. Potentially, these rules could mean big business for our industry, but they could also be a messy situation for your customers and for you as you try to develop a system that effectively meets coverage and recognition requirements.

TWIC not in the driver's seat yet
Adoption within trucking industry remains weak, says report

TWIC just can't get a break. The Transportation Worker Identification Credential is starting first at our nation's ports, and this TSA program wants to put a high-tech access control card in the hands of all port workers and those who regularly enter the port (including trucking companies' drivers). Costs, card technology and even availability of readers come up often as roadblocks, but adoption is also struggling. A recent report says that only 2 percent of truck drivers coming to the Baltimore port have TWIC cards. We post more TWIC and HSPD-12 coverage on our same-named webpage in case you're following those two massive government programs.