It is my humble point of view that the ‘security perimeter’ concept used widely by security professionals and men in the street provides more harm than good. There are many reasons as to why it does, but the main one is that the use of this concept gives a false sense of security.
If you ask an average person what a security perimeter is, they will probably tell you something like ‘it is a warm and cozy place where I can relax and have my cake while everyone outside is coping with the storm.’
The problem is that it is not entirely so. Contrary to popular belief, security risks don’t go away when you are inside the perimeter. Instead, they transform, they change their sources, targets and shapes, but they are still there, waiting for the right moment to strike. What is particularly bad is that those risks are often overlooked by security staff, who only concentrate on risks posed by hostile outside environment (the storm) – but not the ‘safe’ environment inside the perimeter (yet, an odd cherry bone in the cake that might cause the man to choke to death).
The chaos at JFK is a good (well, not for its participants) illustration of this point. For sure, the area of supposed shooting was viewed by security people as belonging to the security perimeter (and extremely well-protected one – I bet it’s nearly impossible to get to the area even with a fake, not to say a real gun). They probably believed that as long as the borders of the perimeter are protected up to eleven, they don’t need to care about anything happening inside it. Indeed, they might have done a great job about protecting the passengers from gunfire, but they overlooked an entirely different type of risk – which, happily, didn’t cause any casualties.
That’s why any security perimeter (in the meaning of ‘straightforward defence facility’) should be viewed not as a security perimeter, but rather as a transition point from one security setting to another. In no way the inner setting is more secure than the outer one – and sometimes it can even be more dangerous than the outer one (imagine there’s no one in to help the choked man deal with the bone). Thinking in this way will help to make a clearer picture of the variety of risks targeting every particular security setting, and come up with appropriate countermeasures.