In Depth

Security Regulations: Chaos in a Three-Ring Binder

Longtime CSO Bob Hayes has documented the reams of regulatory red tape growing in the shadows of 9/11. Is security soon to become a highly regulated activity?

By Sarah D. Scalet

Anyone tempted to disagree should consider Hayes's track record. In 1972, he was part of a team that did some of the earliest research into what causes or prevents crowd violence, as police in Florida tried to prevent the Republican and Democratic National Conventions from ending in the police riots that marked the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Then, 15 years later, when he was the head of security for 3M, Hayes became one of the first practitioners to do anything about workplace violenceyears before the phrase "workplace violence" was part of the lexicon.

"By anybody's standards, he was one of the pioneers in workplace violence prevention for large corporations," says Park Dietz, the renowned criminal psychologist (think the Jeffrey Dahmer case) who is himself the most well-known pioneer in that industry. "If you could do a fair survey of the heads of security of the Fortune 100, Bob's reputation would rank extremely high. I do think he is a forward thinker, and if he sees a pattern there, he's right."

For CSOs, the easy way out of the pattern emerging from Hayes's binders is to let someone else deal with the problem. But the way Hayes sees it, this is a make-or-break opportunity for the profession. "You have a choiceyou can either be part of this and influence it, or sit back and ignore it and let people who have no expertise in security handle it," he says. "That's not a real smart move because then somebody says, Why do we need a security guy?"

This is why. Hayes shuffles through his stack of binders, finds one labeled Regulatory Trends, flips it open and starts talking.The R Word"This," Hayes says, popping open the binder rings and taking out a stack of papers, "is a list I got from somewhere of all the laws that have been passed [or revisited] since 9/11. I'm really bummed I can't figure out where I got this. It was a long time before I really stopped and looked at it." He pauses, thumbing through the document, which is about 15 pages long, a gray blur of laws and proposals about espionage and funding of terrorists, transportation safety and the insurance industry and, of course, the ubiquitous USA Patriot Actall legislative efforts with the underlying goal of improving national security.

"I started flipping through here and said, There's a lot of stuff going on: in the United States; in the United Kingdom. Then I saw this," he says, landing on a page halfway through the document, flashing a Grinch of a grin that makes him look 10 years younger and showing me an alphabetical list of countries also offering security-focused legislation. "Albania, Bosnia, Canada, China. You get the idea? And I say, 'Uh-oh, we're not the only ones.' This was one of the turning points."

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