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This blog article engages in critical commentary on physical security theater through an ironic title, supporting public discourse on the effectiveness of security measures. The platform provides open, free access to information without paywalls or mandatory registration, enabling wider distribution of ideas. However, substantive human rights engagement is minimal; the content does not systematically address UDHR provisions beyond implicit support for information access and freedom of expression.
I’ve been to many very large office buildings with turnstile systems, and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the busiest hours. Yes, they are security theater to a large extent, but they do legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot more efficiently.
There is nothing here that really tells us the turnstile was security theatre? Or the various key card swipes.
There are many ways to skin a cat; and there are many ways to ensure authenticated / trusted access. If you have site wide security gates, it means you know everyone on site / on a given floor conforms to a given minimal security or trust level, so now you can conduct operations in that area with more freedom. This makes the risk assessments for other actions so much simpler. e.g. Now when the apprentice IT tech leaves the SLT's laptop trolley in the corridor it doesn't trigger a reflash of all of the machines. Or when a key individual misplaces their keyfob (e.g. in the kitchen) it doesn't trigger a lockdown of core systems, because they had it on the way in and its reasonable to trust that nobody stole it.
Obviously the implementation was botched in this case - but "feel secure" and "security theatre" are right as often as they are wrong.
I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops.
Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too.
I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was actually secure.
Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers in the door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual request (“close the door behind you, this blocking the friendly person trying to go through, so their scan their card”) is genuinely obnoxious. But a turnstile really does fundamentally let one person through, even if it’s easy to bypass.
As others have mentioned, it comes down to the threat model, but sometimes the threat model itself is uncomfortable to talk about.
It’s sad to think about, but in my recollection a lot of intra-building badge readers went up in response to the 2018 active shooter situation at the YouTube HQ[1]. In cases like this, the threat model is “confine a hostile person to a specific part of the building once they’ve gotten in while law enforcement arrives,” less than preventing someone from coat tailing their way into the building at all.
This text is another reminder about the fact that as organizations grow, they become more and more dysfunctional. They function despite that, because the economies of scale are apparently still larger than the loss of functionality due to the increased size.
Humans' most important achievement is the ability to create structures larger than the Dunbar number. But this is not achieved for free.
(And this is another reason why I strive to work at startups more than at huge corporations.)
Many years ago I was doing due diligence on a point of sale hardware company, I had to head up to an acquisition they had done. People bitched and moaned about the level of physical security added, and when I asked them why they were so upset, they told me to go to the loading dock in the back.
The loading dock was kept completely open "because it's hot and we don't have A/C back here!".
Amazon is pretty serious about physical access security. Even back in 2002, you had to scan your badge while a security guard watches, to check if you are the same person as the badge picture.
The same guard also checked if your dog was registered (I think my dog got a badge with his picture, although I think that was just for fun, and not functional)
And no easy ability to enter through side doors - you couldn't open a side door with your badge. At the time, you could still lurk outside a side door until someone else opens the door to exit. Eventually (11 years later) they locked all the side doors because they noticed people doing this sort of thing.
More recently, I think you have to scan your badge to leave so they can even track how long you're in the building, and know when you're supposed to work on site but you were there only long enough to have a coffee and then went home to continue working from home. This last part is second-hand knowledge since I haven't work there in a long time.
This is the opposite of security theater. It was an apparently an implementation of security with issues but restricting physical access, both for people and vehicles, is absolutely a real improvement to security.
Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces of the employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he didn't know you you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he did know or by showing your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you, and he also somehow knew when you were no longer with the company.
There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those buildings.
I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but this story made it perfectly clear.
Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would seem to me that within minutes of that queue building up the turnstiles + card system would be disabled because something clearly was not working.
I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes, obviously, you need to implement systems that are secure and performant so that you don't get a backed-up line of people waiting an hour just to get into the office in the morning. But that's a notably flawed rollout; millions of employees go into badge-in-required offices every day without issue. And it's kind of hard to imagine running a large office while lacking such basic physical security as "keep unauthorized people out of the building". Having electronic badges and readers is table stakes.
Author here. I posted this on Sunday for a light read, but I guess it got traction today.
Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there. While the cookie credentials are pushed aside. I think that's the security theater. We are worried about supposed active shooters, different physical threats while a backdoor to the company is left wide open. The turnstiles are not useless, they give an active record of who is in the building, and stop unauthorized people. But they also give so much comfort that we neglect the other types of threats.
Whenever I see this in practice I always think a determined killer would clearly know not to attack the “secure” building. Rather, attack the densely-packed line of people waiting to swipe their badges.
Unnervingly, this usually occurs to me when I’m waiting patiently in the densely packed line of fellow targets.
Bad implementations do not "security theater" make. When I did some work for a large coffee company, they had turnstiles at their building entrances, and I don't remember any lines in the morning. The scan/auth/enter process went about as fast as if there was no turnstile.
I remember when I started at Microsoft decades ago that there were still "old-timers" who were pissy about having to use card keys to enter the building. With that attitude, man, did that ever explain Microsoft application and OS security in the early 2000s.
I'm not going to comment on the security implications of either situation, but is there a companion piece by the facilities team complaining about the amount of paperwork required to install turnstiles only for a software engineer to come along and lock them out of Jira on a whim?
I feel both cases involved documentation, approval, months of lead time -- only the OP didnt have to deal with paperwork themselves in the physical securtiy domain.
In every sphere there are attempts at security that either achieve a practical balance of fit versus downsides.
The failure of access cards is probably analogous to a well intentioned sofware authentication system that was implemented without simulating or testing for the scale of deployment, and had to be rolled back when it failed in production.
There was an active shooter in our area a number of years ago and they locked the building down. No one was injured, it was a domestic dispute in a neighborhood a few blocks away. The police caught the guy hiding in some bushes.
In response to the perceived need to "do something", my company put cameras in the hallway we share with other companies and gave the receptionist monitors for the cameras and a panic button that locks all the doors.
It's not a terrible thing, it's largely security theater though. Someone would have to be clearly brandishing a weapon and our receptionist would have to notice this amongst all her other duties and out of all the people in the hall. It could happen, but it seems unlikely.
To be fair, he was pointing out that the invisible "credentials in cookies" issue was much harder to get fixed:
The turnstiles were visible. They were expensive. They disrupted everyone's day and made headlines in company-wide emails. Management could point to them and say that we're taking security seriously. Meanwhile, thousands of employees had their Jira credentials stored in cookies. A vulnerability that could expose our entire project management system. But that fix required documentation, vendor approval, a month of convincing people it mattered. A whole lot of begging.
It also doesn’t describe any of the why the additional security measures were put in place. It sounds arbitrary, but could be an insurance or regulatory requirement that the acquiring company needed to meet. Similar for the login issue, it’s suboptimal but what constraints caused that solution to be put in place? And why wasn’t it fixed?
Sans context there’s not a lot to complain about here.
If forced partition of a building were the primary goal, that goal could be achieved without badges. Or, at least, without having to badge into every door. Just have locks on every door that are normally disengaged, but which can be locked remotely and promptly.
(While at it, I once worked on an access control system. It was aeons ago; the system ran under OS/2. We installed it on a factory. It worked well, until we ran it in demo mode under production load, that is, the stream of morning shift turnstile registration events. The DB melted. I solved the problem trivially: I noticed that the DB was installed on a FAT volume for unknown reasons, so I moved it to an HPFS volume, and increased the RAM cache for the disk to maximum. Everything worked without a hitch then.)
Card readers in elevators are theater though. You would need separate vestibules to actually secure entry via elevator. That’s why most buildings have those.
I doubt these card readers would prevent someone leaving the part of their building they’re in, as that’s a lesson written in charred corpses and was a foundational aspect of health and safety becoming a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
In theory it might prevent access to other buildings, but equally often the card readers are around doors of mostly standard glass or near internal windows of the same.
So if that’s the motivation, it doesn’t seem like a particularly effective mitigation
If an active shooter is the anticipated threat, how does a turnstile effectively stop that? Many of these turnstiles are specifically meant to allow people through in emergencies, and aren't strong enough to withstand bullets or even a sturdy kick. The elevator restrictions would be a better chokepoint, but as the article noted they didn't turn those back on.
> Obviously the implementation was botched in this case
The long wait times could easily have been fixed by staggering employee start times. You could even optimize it per building/floor. Sadly, a lot of bureaucrats lack the imagination to do simple stuff like this. (Anyone with a desperate need to have 9 am meetings would just have to suck it up)
No, the model there is something bad happened, we must do something. This is something, so we will do it.
I’m not saying that to diminish the value of the actual solution, but what the people want is literally something to make them feel better about a situation that is mostly out of their control.
Someone showed up to their workplace with a fucking gun. And now they have to go there every day, and hope it doesn’t happen again. They want and need the theater.
I’ve only worked two places as big as OP described, but you probably see this more when your company leases a third of a floor on a giant office building. Or a floor and a half, or two half floors because it was easier to expand onto the 12th floor.
Elevators do back up, especially when everyone has to scan for their floor. Not like the author suggests, but you can lose a good few minutes a couple times a day that way. It does start some people on an exercise kick of using the stairwell to leave the building. Not great exercise though.
The one place solved this by not building parking garages. Flat parking that went to the horizon. By the time I got to work the spot I parked at was going to be over half a mile from my desk. I bought a grownup scooter with oversized wheels, first day I used it security tracked me down and said those aren’t allowed on company property (I had half a mind to use it on the sidewalks around the outside of the property but didn’t, since I’d still be carrying the stupid thing into the building). But I spent a lot on that scooter and had no other use for it, so I was mad.
My coworker had convinced me that this was billable hours (court precedent about a factory that had a bad setup for employees to get to the time clock) so I started phoning into standup when I was on site but still eight minutes from my desk.
When you’re walking half a mile to the security doors it tends to stagger the arrival times. Which is a feature, if the dumbest one.
What year was that? I was at a startup from 2010 onward and I'm pretty sure we had physical keys until about twelve people and after that it was straight to badges. There was never a time where you could just walk in.
I won't miss the days I had to take a full day of meetings from my car in the Amazon parking lot because there weren't enough meeting rooms onsite, but the badge swipes at the main entrance in-between meetings were needed to not be labeled as an "inconsistent badger".
It was laughable how much effort and money Amazon invested into badge tracking and enforcement instead of directing funds at making the office a nice place that people would want to spend time in and an efficient place to get work done.
Perhaps part of the problem is that an active shooter is easy to visualize and understand whereas unsecured credentials stored in cookies are an abstract and difficult to visualize problem for management.
Furthermore, turnstiles are easy to promote and take credit for. Secure web authentication would have to be explained to and understood by the boss's boss before credit for it could be claimed.
I suspect it's these aspects of organizational reality that results in security theater.
I once lived in Singapore for a while and we were all sure that nobody would steal anything anyway, so we just never bothered to lock the doors. (That was also very helpful if you wanted to stop for a quick coffee with a date in the middle of the night.) You could see the MacBooks from the street, but nothing ever went missing. I don’t know what exactly it was, but Singapore felt incredibly safe and crime-free.
> Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there.
You titled the piece after the turnstiles and spent the overwhelming majority of the post talking about them (and surrounding physical features). The Jira ticket felt secondary, and when it was introduced in the middle of the post I was genuinely confused, thinking why the heck the card system was contacting Jira.
People reading your writing are going to focus on whatever you did when you wrote it. The turnstiles read like the important part.
I care a lot more about my life (or my car's catalytic converter, which was stolen off my car in my work parking lot before they inatalled a gate for the lot) than any of my work-related IT credentials. Health and safety threats are a much bigger deal to people than nebulous, difficult to exploit threats to IP.
Twitch had badged entry and still managed to have a couple of incidents in which people walked in off the street to steal laptops. No snack theft though, thankfully some things are sacred.
It is not the economies of scale but entry cost increase per each new player entering the same market. The real world markets are guarded, price fixing oligopolies.
The most important thing a startup is expected to do is not to get profitable quick but suffocate all possibilities of competition. Dysfunctionality is not a bug, it is a feature of our economic system.
I once worked at a place where the receptionist held the door open for a thief who made off with about 10 PCs, taken from random work desks near the entrance.
She thought that because he was wearing a suit and a badge from his "company" that he must have been supposed to be there, and assumed he was probably taking the computers away to be fixed.
There was surprisingly little repercussion for violating the "one card one person" door policy and by someone whose job it was to know which visitors would be on-site on any given day, and so should have known that this guy wasn't supposed to be there.
Blog article title 'We installed a single turnstile to feel secure' engages in critical commentary on physical security theater, implicitly supporting freedom to seek and impart information about public discourse regarding security effectiveness.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article title uses ironic language: 'We installed a single turnstile to feel secure.'
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Inferences
Ironic framing suggests critical examination of security measures, supporting informed public discourse.
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build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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