By Ira Winkler

At the recent RSA Conference, I witnessed a security “luminary” doing something that bordered on the despicable. I am not going to name the person, because maybe he was having a bad day and I too have had some bad days. However from a security perspective, the behavior was unacceptable.

Basically, this person had a roller board suitcase with him and a security guard tried to stop him as he went to the escalator down to the exhibition level. If you weren’t at RSA, I will tell you that the security guards were generally older, apparently retired people looking for extra income. This guard was a very small, senior citizen. The security luminary was on his cell phone and appeared to be blatantly and purposefully ignoring the guard trying to stop him. As the guard tried to stop him, he almost knocked her over as she was attempting to diligently doing her job. Frankly, if the situation were to progress, it could have been a basis for an assault charge.

As he refused to stop and went down the escalator, she was just repeating to herself that she was going to lose her job. Luckily she saw a police officer and reported the incident to him so that the responsibility was now moved to law enforcement. All the guard wanted this “luminary” to do was check his suitcase at the bag check, which was literally 10 feet away.

An inconvenience, yes. However the fact is that the guard was attempting to enforce security regulations like they were supposed to. Do you know how rare that is? As we are surrounding by guards, who do little more than take up oxygen, it is refreshing to see a diligent guard. Instead, this person treated the guard without respect, jeopardizing their job, and most importantly, ignoring a security policy.

Treating anyone without any morsel of respect is just rude. However when you are a security professional, ignoring security policies is inexcusable. You may not like them, but if you ignore physical security policies, you are sending a message that it is ok to ignore security policies as a whole. Why should anyone adhere to your information security policies, if you demonstrate that it is ok to arbitrarily ignore other security policies?

If you don’t like a security policy, find someone to complain to. However to purposefully ignore the policy, and being part of demoralizing a security guard, who is just doing their job is inexcusable.