Following two interruptions of City Council meetings last week, the main sliding doors into the Council Chamber are supposed to be locked. However, because doing so has been inconvenient to councillors and staff, the sliding doors remain unlocked.
In each incident, the man walked into the Council Chamber and began yelling.
City Council has already forgotten the lessons of its massive cybersecurity failure.
The failure was the result of gross negligence by Council in refusing to implement multi-factor authentication for computer systems because it was inconvenient.
Instead of following basic IT security practices of MFA combined with separating systems, the City of Hamilton connected all systems — the City’s fire dispatch was on the same system as the public library’s printers — and all shared the same superuser access.
All of this because nobody at the City wanted to have to remember their multi-factor access devices, and nobody on City IT management wanted the “inconvenience” of remembering different passwords for different systems.
Sliding Doors and Inconvenience
The closure of the sliding doors would mean that council members and staff need to enter the Chamber from two controlled access doors. This adds around 10 to 15 seconds of walking for them.
The public can continue to access the Chamber via the public entrances that remain open. Security guards are posted outside the Chamber to open doors for anyone needing accessible entry.
The next time a meeting is interrupted, council members will ask why the doors were open, they’ll determine nobody is responsible, and then declare they had no idea the doors right in front of them were open.
Rinse and repeat.
Production Details
v. 1.0.0
Published: August 6, 2025
Last updated: August 6, 2025
Author: Joey Coleman
Update Record
v. 1.0.0 original version