With Friends Like 24...

Who needs enemies? The current season of 24, Fox's weekly festival of dread, took an unseemly turn a couple of episodes back when the fictitious chief security officer of fictitious

By Lew McCreary

April 15, 2005 — CSO — Defense contractor McLennan-Forster enthusiastically perpetrated numerous felonies on his employer's behalf. Since security executives are so seldom seen in prime-time dramas, it is discouraging to see them depicted as, well, criminally insane. But because McLennan-Forster unwittingly employed a terrorist who masterminded various atrocities from his desktop computer, CSO Dave Conlon and other executives conspirewith the CEO's blessingto destroy evidence and obstruct Counter Terrorism Unit Agent Jack Bauer's investigation. In the waning minutes of the episode, the CSO draws his sidearm and pursues Jack and his vaguely untrustworthy comrade, Paul, through the darkened offices, believing that they may have uncovered something incriminating (they have!). The offices are darkened because Dave has set off an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) "bomb" in a desperate effort to obliterate every last 1 and 0 stored on the company's networks and hard drives. Mission accomplished! The EMP fries the local power grid along with the data, plunging a section of the city into darkness and knocking innocent nearby aircraft out of the sky.

All in a day's work for CSO Dave Conlon!

We asked the folks at Fox whether they wouldn't mind sending Kiefer Sutherland, the actor who plays Jack Bauer, to our CSO Perspectives conference last week in Huntington Beach, Calif., just down the road from L.A. where 24 is filmed. We hoped Kiefer (who is also the show's co-executive producer) could explain the creative impetus for this plot twist to a group of real security executives. Fox declined on Mr. Sutherland's behalf. The week after the EMP segment (for those unfamiliar with the format of 24, each episode is a real-time hour of a single, really menacing day), Dave Conlon is mortally wounded wearing SWAT gear and leading a team of paramilitaries in an assault on a sporting goods store where Jack and Paul are barricaded. (Said the boss paramilitary to Conlon: "You want us to kill a federal officer?" Well, yeah, dude.) This occurred only after Conlon and his goons tortured Paul in order to learn where he had stashed the incriminating materials (this was Paul's second torturing of the day, having been half electrocuted by Jack some three hours earlier).

Now, on the one hand, a profession can claim to have really arrived at the point when it starts to be represented in the popular culture. On the other hand, the way the work of security executives has typically been treated (The China Syndrome, The Firm, Silkwood and so on) suggests you may need an aggressive organization to look out for your image and reputationsome functional version of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League. As long as the media think they can safely show you as willing instruments of criminal cover-up, the stereotypes will persist.

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