Slashdot Mirror
Securing Pricelessness
DeliBoy writes "In light of public discussions over security after The Scream was stolen, CSO Online offers an interesting look at museum security. The article details a system designed without budget restrictions intended to secure a painting in a public gallery. Interesting how the consultant balances public access with the need for security, comprised of redundant vibration sensors, overlapping microwave and infrared motion sensors, and an old-fashioned guard. "
Create a super strong plastic box filled with a toxic substance (radioactive/chemical) that's not damaging to the art and have a guard stand outside while another looks on in a camera room somewhere else?
Security - $699
Museum Ticket - $17
Pricelessness - Priceless!
i wonder how they will be calibrating all these many things to fire the right alarm. a mischievious person might get some kicks by raising false alarms every now and then, as all he has to do is to point a finger near the painting. i also wonder how they will test it, and keep it maintained without a large time overhead.
Comment from the article, kinda interesting.
My experience with Museum Directors and Curators is they like to show painting without intrusiveness, such as a low rail or rope. One thing that is less intrusive than placing a low rail/rope across the painting, is putting pressure sensors undernest the flooring that are wired in an alarm point system. This can be addressable to the painting name, gallery and location. Which is capable of notifying the control room security staff as well as the guard in the gallery. Example: if the alarm should be activated the camera would automatic override the monitor that the security staff may be looking at to and give immidate location of the painting as well as the orgin of the alarm right on the monitor. It is also possible to have your CCTV system program to follow movement such as room to room. The options are unlimited with today technology.
P.S. Because of todays technology, the trend is now away from breaking after hours into museum-its now armed robbery during public hours.
Alton Malcolm
Chief of Security
A beowulf cluster of sec....no
Securing my preciiouusss...no
1. Steal Priceless Object 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
...do they mean one that always opens doors and pulls our chairs for the ladies, or one that shakes his fist at teen-aged whippersnappers?
Put a fake on display, and hide the real one somewhere else.
Keller likes to alarm windows and fasten them closed whenever possible.
Didn't anyone tell him that proprietary closed windows models are inherently insecure and that an open-window solution is the better route?
Moo.
I know how "the scream" guys did it. You just wait until the gaurd is asleep, flick the "Alarm On" switch to off, and you're home free.
Before anyone comes up with theories about manic collectors being behind of it all - there isn't a single case in history where a stolen painting was found in the basement of an art aficionado. It's mostly about blackmailing the insurance company in charge - it makes sense for them to pay 2 millions to the thief instead of paying 10 millions for the loss.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Security is but an illusion. The safer you feel, the more likely you are open for attacks. There is no best way, easy way or cheap way to avoid this. It is only then, do you truely feal safe. And in being safe I mean clueless. Get some good insurance and when something does happen, bilk a large multinational corparation for the cost of the problem. Probelm solved. Until Insurance companies try to get you, then you are really screwed. So go dig a hole and die. Safe at last.
If I wanted water, I'd ask for DiHydrogen Oxide!
Snipers nest with a view of the door...or at least someone outside the place to see the getaway.
Most art objects are stolen to order, they are not crimes of opportunity. When a 'collector' is prepared to chough up enough cash professional thieves will invest the time and effort to defeat the security.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Sensors at the exits, guards in the parking lot, etc.
I was hoping this was going to be an article about people getting caught in comprising positions.
Not to mention that when you get guns pulled on you you generally try not to get shot. Even if it ends up costing you something priceless (which still ends up as being less precious than human life, no matter how fine the art).
...is to post a guard next to the painting, armed with a BFG daring people to touch it. Once they do, they're cannon fodder, let them work in shifts and hey presto, cheap security.
Jonathanjk.com
...with frickin' laser beams. That's the ticket.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
and then catch those theives. Of course, some basic "preventive" security is must. some RFID also will help.
for anybody who doesn't know, or wasn't sure, which painting The Scream is, here...
My other sig is an import.
Just secure a thick sheet of glass/lexan/plexiglass between the pictures and the people!
DUH!!!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
If money was no problem, I'd just make a really fantastic replica of the painting (indistinguishable even by experts) and hang it on the wall with regular security and lock all the originals in one nice secure vault.
it's called How to Steal a Million.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/
One of the more intresting parts is a gentleman that causes false positives on a sensor protecting a piece of art. this being at night, the guard gets tired of checking out the art. he then turns off the system. our thief then does his trick and notes the system being off. he then takes the art work and leaves a plain old bottle in it's place...
eric
It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original. Rather than being funny, it sounds like one of the better ideas.
Deleted
I mean, it's not like we haven't already seen these paintings before...
Xaotik Designs
Then simply have a shop style bleepy thing that is set off if one of the RF thingies goes through it!
Or maybe attach the paintings to the walls with something a bit more secure than a nail hehe
You put armed plainclothes or hidden guards OUTSIDE the building. Guards inside and out in the open are useless excpet for keeping the foolish from bumping into things.
Guards hidden inside will have to deploy to the proper area to have an effect on the scene and may be ambushed themselves.
Guards outside the building know the only places people can exit, always be stationed around there, and can ambush the robbers...
Sure, if budget is no object...but it is.
I build an alarm system for a major campus art museum back in the day. This was no small affair - we were replacing an old system that never worked well. The old system had vibration sensors on all the panes in the skylights. Unfortunately these sensors were not only unreliable but also worked in groups of a couple dozen sensors for a skylight area and all sensors had to be calibrated together - a very time-consuming process as it involved after-hours work up on a 30-40 foot airlift (with all tools on teathers to protect the art, of course) and also involved removing the diffuser panel under each of the glass panes. Needless to say the skylights were soon unprotected. We replaced these with redundant infrared motion detectors covering all skylight entry points.
Also, the old system had sensors in groups so when an alarm went off (or went bad) you only got a general area of the problem. We replaced this with about 150-200 individual zones. Every door and every motion detector was on a separate zone. In addition, we had a custom made map of the museum with lights for each alarmed door or zone so the central guard could immediately see where the alarm was coming from. Problems were easy to fix - no hunting down a bad switch from among 20 or 30.
We had several pan/zoom cameras with motion-detection capability. A time-lapse recorder ran constantly and sped up to full-speed when motion was detected.
The security room was upgraded with steel walls and bulletproof glass. In addition, being a campus-run museum, a duplicate alarm receiver was installed at police dispatch (no maps, just a printer showing alarms).
The central guard could control all the lighting in the museum and speak to or listen to anywhere in the museum through the intercom/speaker system.
There's more but all-in-all it was a heck of a system and fun to build.
The end result: management cut back all but one of the off-hours guards (the one in the control room) and eventually cut that person as well since, after all, the alarms went to the police station anyway...
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Part of securing a priceless artifact is also getting it back if the security guard falls asleep and the thing gets stolen.
The person who stole The Scream should, one would hope, have a very hard time selling it. He's going to have to be insanely discrete. "Let's just say that *wink* my friend has this painting that *wink* he'd be willing to sell you." just won't cut it.
Maybe it's just me, but in my experience over-reacting in one area and not reacting in another is silly, expensive quite often, and futile.
While mueseums might become more secure there are still going to be things stolen. Nothing is 100% secure. If mueseums are going potentially lessen my non-stealing viewing pleasure I'd like to also know how they're planning on re-coordinating with International Law enforcement.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Yep there are some real whiz bang gadgets out there, but it all boils down to having a comfortable security station with a talented group of people watching the video screens and monitoring the alarms zones and then effectively communicating events to the floor guards.
In reality what you get is a run down closet in the basement with a single bored guard, with little training, getting minimum wage. It negates the thousands of dollars spent on gadgets. Did you see anything in the article about staff and staff training? No - just gadgets.
At night you can get away a minimal number of guards because you can set up cameras systems to automatically shift to a video spot based on motion detection. During the day this isn't an option. It requires constant screening of all video stations.
There's more to security than installing alarms.
But what if the security guard was really a ninja in disguise? Then he can flip out and kill all the visitors, and then wail on a guitar that produces sonic waves to disarm all security systems, and then he can proceed to steal the artifacts. Conclusion: The security guard is the flaw of the system.
Any work of art (or any physical object) will be lost at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not this century, but for any artwork, at some point, the circumstances will will collude to lose it it some manner. Increasing the efforts to counteract that may delay the inevitable, but will not prevent it.
So, what do you do? Encase the piece in extreme layers of security to stave off its inevitable dissolution - but then also greatly hinder any real appreciation of the work by spectators? It's not easy to enter a contemplative frame of mind facing a painting at four or five meters, through ten cm of safety glass and surrounded by armed guards.
Or, we accept its eventual destruction or loss as inevitable, relax the measures a bit, and let people appreciate it - _really_ appreciate it, up close and undisturbed - while it lasts.
If I'd been a sappy touchy-feely type, I'd made a comment about how that is a lesson for life as well, but I'm not, so I won't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Being Norwegian I was quite interested in this, as were the Norwegian media. The largest Norwegian television-channel, NRK, interviewed a biographer of Munch's. When asked what he supposed Munch would have thought of this theft he replied something like (and I'm translating off the top of my head here):
If it were on one of Munch's better day's he'd probably say something like: "The Geniality of the artwork lies in the Thought and the Act, not in the Result. The Thought caused the Act, and I did it. The work itself is of little importance." But, Munch was a temperemental man so he might have been livid.
And it wasn't exactly the only example of The Scream ("Skrik"), as there are several other versions made by Munch around the world. Still, I wish the thieves all possible good luck in selling the best-known image in the western world without being found out :)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
Put a fake on display, and hide the real one somewhere else.
That's called "security through obscurity," my friend.
They make you watch "How to Steal a Million" in high school!!! ;-)
;-)
No, seriously, back in late 70s-early 80s our school (Moscow #45, anyone else from there?) somehow got that movie and it was a required part of our (middle? or high? do not remember which grade) school English class. No, not only watching once, but we had its script printed out and had to memorize and recite scenes...
Not that I had any fun doing this back then, but it was lots of fun to watch it on TV a couple of years ago and shock my GF by reciting the dialogue before characters actually say it.
And yes, it is actually a great movie!
Paul B.
It's getting to you can't even speak without infringing someone's bs copyrights : "drivers wanted" (VW), "do the right thing" (Quaker Oats), "just do it" (Nike), "hello, world" (SCO).
Yeah, but thieves often cut paintings free of their frames to make them easier to move, hide, etc. It's kind of a lost cause to bug a painting, unless you put the locator in an indispensable part of the canvas itself, and I don't think many curators would do that to a pricless masterpiece.
Plus, to bring it back to someone else's point, most major art thefts are going to involve ginormous insurance liabilities. Those insurance companies don't want to encourage wary thieves to go poking through the Mona Lisa with a pair of tweezers.
John Hancock wuz here.
merely cause I'm sick of people telling others how to mod.
or a couple of fun movies that show the two ends of the spectrum for art theft try Thomas Crown Affair for the sublime, and Ordinary Decent Criminal for the ridiculous.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Just secure a thick sheet of glass/lexan/plexiglass between the pictures and the people!
You could do that in movie theaters to prevent bootleggers, but think of the outrage that would generate in the viewing public.
Now, replace "movie theaters" with "The Louvre" and "viewing public" with "art world" and imagine the uproar. Not to be a total elitist snob, but isn't it a much greater loss to culture to be cut off from appreciating the nuances of the great masters than to miss a frame of Pamela Anderson's "Bikini Car Chase 7"?
John Hancock wuz here.
this old fashioned enough for you?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I don't see anyone bitching about other artifacts being in display cases. Pull your head out of your ass, mmmkay?
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
In one instance, I'm glad that they're keeping people employed by using the good old-fashioned guard. And human interpretation is usually much better than a machine trying to perform a simple task and alarm if their criteria for someone breaking in is met.
:)
However, at the same time, there's always the human weakness in a given security system. If someone were able to pose as a fellow security guard, museum archivist, or anyone higher-up than the security guard, they could still get access to the painting through the guard. Of course, this depends on how smart the guard is (and the procedures of the museum), but it could probably work.
As Kevin Mitnick has shown, humans can be a great weakness to a security system as well as a great strength. The only real exception here is that it's in the real world with a museum rather than through the internet/modem lines with a corporation (or a security expert's laptop)
But that's just my opinion.
If your society was based on anything other than winning, you would have less thieves.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Well, since you asked ...
Seriously, I don't see a problem with GP's idea. Last time I was at Le Louvre, admittedly in the late 80's, the Mona Lisa was behind plexiglass, reflected on two mirrors, and physically located at least a storey away (to me, a grade 9 student at the time, it seemed pretty cool). If it's that important, that's what the museum will do. For whatever reason, The Scream was not priceless enough to warrant this.
I think that, as long as the thieves know what they have to get through, there are easy ways to break through all of these materials.
The problem we have with your argument is that it can be said of civilization as well. Sometime in the future, the United States will collapse, its language will change, its entire culture will cease to exist, a relic for the people of the future to study. Why bother trying to prevent it? It is inevitable, all civilizations decline and collapse eventually.
The point is this is what we have been doing since the first city was founded tens of thousands of years ago. Do you think the people in ancient Izmir believed their city would last for thousands of years? It did, but they certainly knew most did not.
This is the cycle of life. Ascendence and decline, light and dark, life and death. So we live in a delusional age which arrogantly believes it will last forever. That doesn't mean you should be taking the opposite view, and argue that defeat is inevitable so forget about it.
Life is struggle
It is this struggle that defines who we are, that gives our life meaning. It is what allows our greatest moments of happiness and glory, for they are only as great as the despair and defeat we endure. We must strive to preserve our culture, to strengthen it, for that is ultimately our gift to our children, and our key to immortality. We may fail, but our humanity comes through striving despite the bad things that happen.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
this seems like an obvious solution that I just thought of, but I'll post it anyways. For the really nice artworks that need protecting, the room has 2 doors to get into it (separated with a small hallway). Both doors cannot be opened at the same time. Have a sensor on the artwork that locks both doors when lifted.
I did not say "forget about it". I just said, do not attempt to preserve it to the point where you remove the reason for preservation in the first place.
We could put paintings in specially designed steel crates, in a nitrogen atmosphere, weld them shut, encase in uge blocks of concrete and store at the bottom of a mine. That will save them for a long, log time (though not forever). That will also make the works utterly pointless - they may as well have been destroyed for all practical purposes.
An open society makes for an excellent parallel, actually. You should not ignore security (as a broad term) altogether, but if you are too heavy-handed and too intrusive, you end up destroying the very freedoms that you are attempting to preserve.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
some time of innocuous tracking device affixed to the painting? RFID maybe? some type of monitoring system that ensures that the paintings stay in certain locations.... ...yeah i know it sounds stupid...
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Well, million years of experience have proven us the robustness of the system! :)
If the purpose of the theft was to sell it to a collector, then it was sold before they ever stole the thing in the first place. Some rich mofo hired them to take it, simple as that.
If it was not sold, then it was stolen in order to ransom it back to the insurance company.
When you're dealing with extremely rare items like this, it's always one of these two, if indeed money is the motivating factor at all.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
..."vibration sensor" just SOUNDS dirty. Then again, this isn't anything a little chlorine gas couldn't handle... oh, right, preserve the paintings. Damn.
During the meeting I suddenly realized that the nice little painting hanging on the wall wasn't just a print... it was a real, live, authentic Monet.
I asked about it and the security guy shrugged. He said that like most museums they had far more art in storage than on display, and so they often used it in office decoration.
I mean, the thing didn't have so much as a plastic covering to protect against coffee spills. I remember thinking that there'd be no way I'd want such a thing in my office.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
There are two different kinds of false alarms. The motion detection thingy is practical for notifying the local guards that some joker is trying to fondle the painting, and stopping that from happening. The other kind is, of course, when that motion alarm automatically alerts the police. Which might be what happened prior to the Scream theft. neither the museum nor the police wnat to comment on how many times they were called out to a motion alert prior to the theft.
Seal item in uranium block, bury somewhere in Iraq. Ain't nobody gonna steal that fucker.
Stuck down a hole! In the middle of the night! With an owl!
This is the part that impressed me: 9 Closed-circuit TV cameras . . . Anti-integration makes things difficult for the bad guys; it means they will have to break two systems instead of one.
Redundancy is a Good Thing. Heterogeneous redundancy is a Better Thing. Here endeth the lesson.
www.wavefront-av.com
Simply wrap it in tin foil
I can' find my pictures from when we visited the Mona Lisa in France, but I don't recally much security around it. Everyone was taking pictures of it, but I believe it was in a glass case of some sort on the wall. It was buried deep wihtin the museum, about a 20 minute walk in, up and down many stairs, so that alone would make a quick escape difficult.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
In Norway security guards are not allowed to carry weapons. The robbers were armed, and I think they fired warning shots. Any sane person would have stood still until it was over.
No alarms or anything else would have helped, because the painting was on the wall and accessible.
The canvas was cut out of the frame, so no securing of the frame would have been of any help.
The only thing which would have helped would have been closing down the room with the robber, but that would have risked the wellbeing of the other people in the same room, there were at least one other person in there with the robber.
The Speedy Viking
Since I can get scraps on ebay, I picked up some lexan for what plexi would cost. Once I installed it as a window you couldn't tell it was 1/4" - it's totally thickless. I mentioned this to my brother and he described this huge (10 foot or so) block of lexan with text lazor etched in the center that could be easily read. I'm not sure technically, but it seems a lot more ..transparent (or something) than glass.
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon. It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence.
Interestingly, I work at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg VA, and just got back ten minutes ago from a tour of the Maier Museum with a student discussion group I lead.
The Maier is the 1950's version of exactly what you describe. It was built in 1951 as a bomb shelter for the National Gallery in case of nuclear attack on Washington. There was a fleet of trucks always at the ready outside the gallery to grab the most "valuable" artworks and run them down to the Maier. The building is basically a blockhouse, although it has been spiffed up a lot since.
With advances in technology, it became clear in the 1970s that this just wasn't going to work. (Not to mention Lynchburg has a large number of nuclear industries here like Framatone, so we're a huge target anyway.) They quietly abandoned the whole thing about then and formally gave it up in 2001, but there's still a clause in the contract that we'll take art from the Gallery if there's a major concern. Given the inherent problems of moving very fragile art quickly, I suspect that nobody is really interested in doing something like this.
BTW: The Maier now focuses on American art from RMWC's collection. It's a damn good museum, especially given the size of the college.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Please don't tell me that I'm prejudiced. You may have noticed that almost all of the truly horrible things that happen unprovoked in the world today happen because some asshole decided that it was the 'will of Allah' that such a thing should happen.
Such a thing did happen.
Remember when the US bombed Bagdad?
"Seal item in uranium block, bury somewhere in Iraq. Ain't nobody gonna steal that fucker."
It's not like nobody has been stealing anything in Iraq, for starters. It's really peaceful and secure over there, with no looting, riots, or insurgency.
On top of that, I think the Uranium might make it both easier to find and a more tempting target for somebody to dig up than just a buried painting. "The Scream" doesn't exactly have military value, but a block of uranium big enough to encase it might.
The general thrust of your plan is good, though-- if you're willing to forgo ever having anyone SEE the painting, you can make it very secure. I would suggest something more along the lines of just tossing it in the fire. That method has the same effect on people's ability to see it, but guarantees nobody can steal it ever again.
ohhhhh SNAP!