A tank is wheeling along a country road. A device, set on a tripod a short distance away, has been programmed to sense just such a menace. There is a flash of orange. The vehicle veers into a ditch, its turret blown away by a rocket. The operation, run from afar, is captured on videotape.
Not a conventional security system, to be sure, but the anti-tank device, developed by the Army, impressed even the professionals at the recent National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association convention at the Sheraton Chicago Hotels & Towers.
Security is an old problem. For thousands of years, since cave dwellers first discovered the value of barking dogs, the basic principles of protection-detect, delay, repel-have not changed much.
But now there are such devices as the anti-tank system-and sticky foam. “What’s the false alarm rate on that one?” chortled one audience member when Basil Steele of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque showed slides of a new system that floods a floor with several feet of white glop from what looks like a giant can of shaving cream.
“Zero,” Steele said. “It’s operator generated,” meaning that miscreants have to be spotted by guards, not just detected by machinery, before being hit and slowed by the thick foam.
As the convention showed, there is no shortage of security blankets for home and office, and designers are trying to make them user-friendly.
“The big aim today is to make controls more sensitive, easier to understand,” noted Rob Gerhardt, of Electronic Environments Inc. of Dallas.
Gerhardt offered suggestions during a session called “The Integrated Home of the ’90s,” which discussed ways to merge electronic entertainment, telephones, lights, window treatments, heating, air conditioning and security into one home system.
Modern home systems can be programmed, Gerhardt said, so they understand, for example, “who gets up first and who uses the bathroom first,” a factor that determines “if the shower radio switches on to sports or music.” Home security can be customized similarly.
Grandma will be safe
“Now, if Grandma comes to stay,” said one supplier, “she need only enter her personal code number at the command center, then push `yes,’ to kick in a preset of the alarm system, geared to how she uses the house.”
Other settings, like one-key commands on a personal computer, can be used by children who come home alone after school, or to quickly readjust offices that close down on weekends.
Much of the talk during the four-day convention had to do with workplace devices, such gadgets as motion sensors, body-heat detectors, infrared area scanners and sophisticated entry procedures. There are machines that can identify employees by checking fingerprints, listening to voices and, in the case of a retina scanner, gazing deeply into eyeballs.
Other machines use what one speaker called “signature dynamics,” which assess the speed and pressure points with which a person writes a signature. Or they can be set up to handle “facial recognition systems,” checking out a human face.
Sometimes, security is all in the presentation. An X-ray machine and a metal detector in an office don’t seem so mistrustful if they are sheathed in mahogany.
The convention showed that office security has reached a new level of subtlety. In one presentation, a slide showed an executive sliding one hand into the mouth of a palm-reading machine, which later confirmed his identity. Equipment is now available that can track the paths taken by workers carrying, say, a pot of gold inside a plant and which can detect those who deviate from established routes.
Among the other finds: laser radar, which needs no light and can produce pictures of someone creeping under a fence and running across a darkened yard; and a system that can fill a room with acrid smoke, which won’t harm objects but makes stealing them difficult for thieves who fail to bring gas masks.
Many of the convention’s 700 delegates were contractors who buy components and try to combine them into systems that homeowners will use, and be able to understand. Not all devices, they agreed, work as planned.
“False alarms are a problem we’ve had to dance around for years,” admitted one speaker, Ted Waibel, of TVX Inc., a manufacturer of visual alarm verification systems in Broomfield, Colo.
Overwhelmed by misfiring detection systems, set off by everything from thunderclaps to children’s drifting balloons, many police departments now charge $30 to $300 for answering such summonses, Waibel said.
To make distinctions between, say, a cat and a cat burglar, many installers now use a combination of detection and assessment systems. Some match sound and motion detectors.
TVX’s technology employs a mini-TV camera and an infrared strobe light to transmit four pictures in 20 seconds over phone lines, allowing its central station operatives, before they call in the police, to assess such questions as, “Is the intruder armed? Is the victim down? What are we up against?”
What that means, Waibel said, “is that, if a box falls over, the police don’t come. If someone’s breaking in with a crowbar, they do.”
A little perspective
The convention was also a time for looking back. Many spent spare moments thumbing through “A History of Security,” a 255-page work by business historian William Greer, which was commissioned by the association and was recently updated to include a 35-page appendix, “Who’s Who in the Alarm Industry.”
According to the book, the desire for alarm security began thousands of years ago, “soon after we put a value on life and property and learned we could lose both suddenly and without warning by fire, stealth and force.”
More than 4,000 years ago, Egyptians began securing the treasures of their deceased pharaohs inside mammoth pyramids, an early application of the protection-in-depth principle later used in bank vaults.
The Romans, looking for incursion detectors, turned to geese. In 386 B.C., the Roman historian Livy reported, a marauding band of Gauls, under cover of darkness, tried to sneak up on Romans sleeping atop Palatine, then best known as one of Rome’s seven hills.
The intruders slipped past guards and dogs, all asleep, but “the cackling of the birds and the clapping of wings awoke Marcus Manilius, a distinguished officer,” Livy wrote, “and he, seizing his sword, giving the alarm, hurried straight to the point of danger.”
As other historians note, the trends in recent centuries have been toward mechanical and now electronic devices. In the early 1700s, the first burglar alarm was installed in London by an inventor named Tildesley, consisting of chimes linked to a door lock. Set off by an intruder, he claimed, “it would doubtless prompt him to take precipitate flight.”
In Plymouth, Mass., a Colonial bank cashier ran a wire from the vault of his bank underground to his nearby bed. If anyone tried anything during the night, bells went off.
Colors as clues
These days, one helpful device is closed-circuit television-in color. According to Security Distributing & Marketing, a monthly magazine distributed at the convention, color can be useful in gathering evidence, such as accurate reproductions of tattoos.
“When I look at a system, I look at detection, delay and response,” said Steele, of Sandia labs, during an interview. “You need all three. It’s not enough to detect an adversary. You have to delay him, until the police get there.”
But deterrence is still the main goal. It can involve such wrinkles as preset, vacation-mode lighting, to give a house a lived-in look when occupants are away. Or outside strobe lights, which flash on and off to pinpoint a house in trouble for the arriving authorities.
After all, noted Dennis Gross, president of the association, “If your house is too involved, a burglar will go somewhere else.”
