Oscars Security: May I Secure the Envelope Please?
How do they keep the Oscar winners secret?
By Daintry Duffy
April 01, 2003 — CSO — Greg Garrison is the keeper of the juiciest secret in Hollywood—the identities of the Oscar winners. As the lead ballot partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) in Los Angeles, Garrison commandeers a group of accountants that tabulates the Oscar nominations and preserves the security of the results until each envelope is unsealed on stage. It's a process that has remained low-tech and unchanged for 70 years.
At an undisclosed location, Garrison and his team of four to five accountants sift through the 5,700-odd ballots to determine the winners. The ballots are divided among the team members so that no one, other than Garrison and his partner, knows the identities of the winners. Scoffing at computer systems, which could be tempting targets to hackers, PWC guards the final tabulations and ballots the old-fashioned way
Are all these elaborate machinations necessary for Oscar's security? Garrison believes so. After all, in Hollywood everyone's got an angle. You never know when you're going to be accosted by a persuasive diva who will try to charm the identity of the best actor winner out of you
Read more about data protection in CSOonline's Data Protection section.
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