> > About a year ago, as a contractor, I produced an industrial > > training program, called the diamond program, for the US > > Mint in San Francisco. The security involved in getting > > hired, and getting in and out of the place, each day, was > > very, very intense; FBI background clearance (including > > interviews with my neighbors), and fingerprint check, two > > man traps, guard access and scrutiny at three points, metal > > detectors, x-ray for anything loose, and always in the > > presence of well trained, heavily armed federal police > > officers. Even going out for lunch I had to do this. > > That's sort of neat. I have a customer in downtown St. Louis > right next to the Federal Reserve. Every once in a while, I > will see a Brinks style truck making a pick up or delivery, > and having those same heavily armed federal police officers > standing guard on either side until the pick up is completed.
Twice in my life I have done work for Citibank. The second time was in New York, and I only learned after a few weeks working there that the building we were in was in the Top Ten Potential Terrorist Targets in the city. *Not* because of Citibank, but because two of the floors above us in the building contained offices of the Israeli government. We got used to guys riding the elevators with us obviously packing heat, and one day I actually had to make a delivery for my bosses to one of those floors. When I stepped off the elevator I found myself enclosed in a bomb-proof man trap, and surrounded outside the shatterproof plastic by men with Uzis. I never got any further than that man trap. They asked my business, asked me to show my ID, and then had me push my package through a small window in the man-sized trap into a smaller one, where it was X-rayed and sniffed by dogs. Then they told me to go. That said, this was only the second-most secure build- ing I've ever been in. The first was in L.A. Again I was doing work for Citibank, and that work occasioned me to drop off something at an address I'd been given in Pasadena. When I drove up, I thought I'd gotten the address wrong, because it was a very normal-looking strip mall, containing only a few very normal stores and a 7-11. I parked and walked to the address I'd been given, and found myself in a fairly normal-looking travel agency office. A nice lady asked who I was, again looked at my Citbank ID, and took the envelope I was delivering, and I left. Only later did I find out that the whole place was straight out of Maxwell Smart. Inside the inner doors of the outer office was another similar man trap, lead- ing past armed guards to a secure elevator that led down several stories below the ground to an enormous computer center. Why was it so secure? It contained the servers that routed all electronic banking and trading transactions that went through the West coast of America to and from Asia. One bomb placed there would have wreaked economic disaster, because it would have taken the entire system offline for weeks or months. I have heard since that such data centers are now redundant, meaning that there are many such secret locations, so that one could provide backup if another is taken offline by an earthquake or terrorism.
