When you’re among the reviled 1 per cent, it’s probably more difficult than ever to sleep at night knowing there’s a protest movement growing against you. And although it poses no threat, Occupy Wall Street is spurring a security shopping spree.
The NYT’s Kevin Roose reports firms like Risk Control Strategies, which caters to trembling Wall Street moneybags, is seeing a business boom as the rest of the economy stagnates:
There are biometric door locks that read palm prints, infrared cameras that can spot potential intruders in total darkness and in-ground sensors that can detect motion around a home’s perimeter and immediately transmit data to a dispatcher.
And all of that stuff costs major cash — enough to double business for RCS by 100 per cent this year, which monitors its clients from a Pentagon-like war room.
But fortifying your Hamptons crib and being chauffeured in a bulletproof town car won’t stop the realest (or perhaps, only real) threat to this ilk: hackers. Although Anonymous has delivered nothing but talk so far, and most of its talent is locked up, the group has proven both the eagerness and ability to crack into some seriously sensitive data. If there’s going to be an assault on the gilded gods of the financial sector, it’ll more likely be a dump of someone’s emails, not a bullet through their window. And there’s no biometric door lock that can stop that. [NYT]