So if you see a big building with KAOS or SPECTRE or Thrush in big letters across the top floor you should just stay away; their lobby security team is probably rather unfriendly & distinctly violent. 
Hmm.
My experience in Lower Manhattan is, I had to talk to the guy at the front desk (yes, there was someone there) and explain who I was and whom I was meeting, then I had to wait for the person I was meeting to come down to the lobby and escort me up the elevators themselves; no way the receptionist was just going to let me walk in and wander around on my own. However, this was a 200-year-old office building, not a modern office building. I did not see any ID scanner or a Matrix-style checkpoint; this was more like walking into Information Retrieval.
The most ridiculous one of those is one I came across while working as a security guard. It was a research park which hired out very expensive workshop facilities, including to some pretty major companies, so some eye-wateringly expensive stuff, much of which was supposed to be top secret.
We were hired to both do lock-up and guard the exterior until 10pm, because there was a gap in their CCTV coverage in the parking area; you could access it invisibly from a neighbouring footpath, so some local teenagers had been messing around building skate ramps and stuff in the dead spot, causing a mess. It was supposed to be a few months until they got a new camera installed, but I think the contract eventually ran for 3 years.
Unsurprisingly, inside, it was supposed to be really tight security. You couldn’t get out the lobby without a badge and every door bar the bathrooms needed a badge to get both in and out; to get out without a badge you had to hit an emergency button which triggered an alarm, with big signs saying not to do this unless it was an emergency. All the compartments were individually programmed access and the corridors were all covered with cameras, but none inside the ‘top secret’ workshop areas.
First issue, they’d obviously never heard the term ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ because they handed me an all-areas access pass without ever even getting my name, forget an ID. I said which company I was from and that was enough. I got to wander around the whole place several nights a week for a couple of months checking everyone had left, including the areas with big signs saying ‘restricted access, no cameras allowed’, just me and an 18 year old who worked for the same company as me. Apparently they did check his ID the first day when they’d showed him round, but the fact that he recognised me was apparently good enough.
Second issue- and this was the really crazy one- I got in one day on a Friday late afternoon, and the place was deserted (quite common on Fridays), but the doors to the main workshop area were open.
The doors big enough to drive a truck in. The ones that opened straight into the parking area right where the CCTV dead spot was.
It turned out, they’d had an issue with the plumbing, so someone had hired a plumber, escorted them into the toilet block which opened into the workshop area to fix the issue, then completely forgot about it and went home early, cos it was Friday. When the plumber finished, they realised everyone had left, and the only door that could be opened without setting off an alarm was that huge vehicle door, so they’d just opened it and also gone home. I assume the thinking was that a door that size couldn’t be opened without people knowing about it.
Not just security theatre, but a security comedy show.
Quite often security is about checking a box on a list, not deep analysis. One presumes this is how you get the vent tube that allows you to blow up the entire Death Star.
Or as Scott Adams put it:
Dilbert: “Isn’t that a bit risky?”
Dogbert: “Let me check… No, my contract says I get paid regardless.”
I find it incredulous that the people putting up cameras would miss an area with access to a giant door. But…
Beauty.
In the early 2000s I was at the main datacenter of A large International insurance Group (yes, that’s a hint). We were working on a project using a machine lent to them by IBM. At some point we needed to reIML the machine (think “reboot” but lower-level), so needed to get at the physical hardware.
Our contact was off somewhere, but we asked his office-mate–whose name was Wally and who looked an AWFUL lot like Wally from Dilbert–if he could take us into the datacenter. “Sure!”
So we trundle down there, he opens the door, and says “Have fun” and walks away. My colleague and I looked at each other in horror and discussed what to do. We already knew it was unmanned; if we went in and anything bad happened, we could be in Big Trouble. Eventually we said “What the heck”, ran in, did our thing, and got the heck out ASAP.
Note that this was before 2008. We were unsurprised to learn that the company in question had to be bailed out in that debacle (OK, that’s not really fair, but still, we kinda said “No wonder”).
At my current office, you can only enter our building (one of three connected towers) by coming in past the guards, you have to badge to open the door, then badge to get through the gate on the other side of the door, then you have access to the elevators. Once you go up to any floor you have to badge again to get into the offices. Some areas have additional badge controls. There’s also badge readers on every floor in the stairwells.
Already in 1993 my brother was working in a building in NYC that required visitors to go through security. When I visited him there on Feb. 26 that year I was to meet him for lunch and I had to stop at security and they called him. He came down although I imagine he might have been able to bring me up to his office. The building was on the south side of Liberty St. from the World Trade Center and was basically destroyed on 9/11. And, by the way, that date is the date of the first attempt to bomb the WTC.
I watched two office buildings increase security. One went from no security to mediocre security, and the other went from “show your badge to the guard, if he noticed” to "use your badge to get through this turnstile, or alternatively, talk to the guard who was really slow even if you were an employee with other photo id. (And they had badge photos on file to check that you were the employee you claimed to be.)
But i just noticed this is FQ, and I’m wondering where one would find collective data, and not just anecdotes.
What part of that is a trope? The times I have had to enter large midtown Manhattan office buildings, I have had to show ID at the security desk in the lobby, they look at or scan my ID, print a visitor pass, and then I can enter the turnstiles to access the elevators.
That’s assuming they actually look at the ID photo. Forty years ago in college, we were required to show our student IDs at the cafeteria and people would swap them around, so that a female student would show the ID of a male student, or a white student would show the ID of a black student.
When we used to put our badges on the camera/scanner and it was reviewed by an unseen guard somewhere we had a contest to see what we could get away with. Baseball cards were easy, and a few other things worked easily, but a can of tuna was the winner.
We had to wear our ID badges on our chest clipped to shirt or jacket or else on a neck lanyard. It didn’t have any fancy electronic stuff, just a ~1"x1" full face picture, name, title, and employee ID number.
Over the years evermore guards and whatnot looked evermore closely at them.
But back when that wasn’t such a fussy process, one fellow found a suitably-sized picture of a real gorilla in a newspaper. So a pixelated low-res image on light tan paper. He taped the gorilla head onto his badge over his own face and wore that everywhere clipped to his shirt, so facing out; not half-hidden dangling on a lanyard.
He said about 1 person per year noticed. Thank goodness everyone always wears their badges. The incremental security value is … infinitesemal.
Was this an office building, or a top-secret government facility?
I was theoretically supposed to wear my badge visibly at all times in my last office job. I left it in my pocket, like most employees.
My idea of an office building is one with several (usually unrelated) business tenants where the gatekeepers are not in the lobby. To be fair, I haven’t had much call to physically visit any in the last several decades (thank you, Internet)
As I noted in my post, in my experience in Chicago in the last decade, that’s a big thing that has changed: big multi-tenant office buildings now may have gatekeepers in the lobby, as well as gatekeepers in the individual tenant spaces.
If that was addressed to me, badges were to be worn whenever in work uniform at an airport or on an airplane. Also if in any non-public area while dressed in civvies.
Ok? Not sure what a school cafeteria 40 years ago has to do with modern day office buildings in Midtown Manhattan or why you think the security would in any way be comparable.
I’m still wondering what the “trope” is supposed to be.
When Lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School instituted an ID requirement after 9/11, it was reported that several students had walked in after flashing IDs where their photo was pasted over with one of Osama Bin Laden.
When I started working at an intelligence agency forty years ago, we were issued picture badges. When entering/exiting a building, we held them up so that security guards at building entrances could inspect them visually. That was building security.
(This gave me the habit of sometimes reaching for a non-existent badge when entering/exiting a store or bank where a security guard was on duty.)
Within 5-10 years, they put in machines at the entrances and issued us new badges which contained electronic information. They also assigned us 4-digit codes. We inserted our badge into the machine and typed the code.
Later still, they put in wireless systems: we just placed the badge next to the contactless reader (no code required). Wireless systems needed less maintenance, due to reduced wear and tear. Much faster too.