Over the past week or so, I’ve had quite a few conversations with people about the UBC Bill Reid thefts at the Museum of Anthropology. In most of those discussions, everyone seems to share the opinion that there are two plausible scenarios that appear most likely, 1) that the security at UBC is incredibly inept; or 2) someone on the inside was in on the job.
The CBC seems to have confirmed the answer to that question.
The whole incident is a sad example of how important the human element is in a security system. You can spend millions of dollars on security technology, but if nothing happens when an alarm is received… any possible value is eliminated.
Alarms are not much of a deterrent anymore… and any deterrent value they do have is reduced each day as more alarms are installed. If your alarm trips, and noone comes, you don’t have security. It doesn’t matter what it cost or how cool the technology is. The only purpose for an alarm is to generate an immediate response.
If what you are protecting is irreplaceable and really important, you cannot have any single points of failure anywhere in the security process… from the detection devices installed, to the monitoring equipment that receive the signals to the response procedures for the people responsible for doing something about them.