Burned by technology

Jim Dwyer has an article in The New York Times about the other current scandal:

Under siege by thieves who regularly got their hands on old-fashioned room keys, hotels in New York began using electronic locks on their doors in 1977, led by the fabled, fusty Algonquin. The new keys would be plastic, with a magnetic strip swiped through a card reader on the door. They would leave an electronic trail, stamped with the times that a door opened, closed or was left ajar.
It is likely that this technology will provide an informative record of traffic in and out of the suite at the Sofitel Hotel where a 32-year-old housekeeper, a widowed immigrant and mother, encountered Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund..
Since Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of sexual assault, his allies have been busy inflating trial balloons. Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, declared that the evidence was “not consistent with forcible encounter”, inviting, inevitably, the suggestion that no force was evident because none was required. Mr. Brafman thus walked up to the edge of the cliff but did not quite say there had been consensual sex.
As Mr. Strauss-Kahn surely knows from his far-flung travels, the hotels of the world are cleaned by immigrants, most of them women. The women’s vulnerabilities are legion, and in many countries, hoteliers have adopted a raft of precautions to protect staffs and guests. For example, if a male guest calls for service, the housekeeping department will send up a male attendant.
“Oftentimes, male guests will order the pay-per-view adult movies, and then call for towels, perhaps hoping that a woman will be sent to bring them up,” said Peter M. Krauss, chief sales and marketing officer for Plasticard Locktech International of Asheville, North Carolina, which provides card keys to hotels. “So whenever they can, the hotels will send up a male if the call comes from a male guest.” Another policy, he said, is housekeepers do not work behind closed doors. “With a Sofitel, their standards would dictate the door was either open, or at a minimum, ajar, when housekeeping is in the room,” Mr. Krauss said. This is a practice at virtually all hotels, he said, and can be done with a latch or by leaving a cart in the doorway.
The authorities have said that the housekeeper at the Sofitel knocked on the door to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite, called out to announce herself, used her master keycard to open the door, and left the work cart in the doorway, keeping it open.
“They would have a record of her using the key to gain access,” Mr. Krauss said. “They should have a record of the door remaining open for a certain period of time, and the door lock being actuated again. The system can differentiate between the guest’s card key and the housekeeper’s master key.”
Inside the suite, the authorities said, the housekeeper entered the bedroom to clean and Mr. Strauss-Kahn then emerged naked from a bathroom and began to attack her. When the woman ran for the door, it is charged, Mr. Strauss-Kahn shut it, an act of unlawful imprisonment.
“They know what time the maid opened that door, propped open that door, and when someone closed that door,” Mr. Krauss said.
If the defense for Mr. Strauss-Kahn maintains that the encounter was consensual, its version will have to accommodate the unambiguous computer record of her leaving the door propped open. It will also have to explain how and when she decided that sex with Mr. Strauss-Kahn was a better use of her time than changing the linens.
The news from France is that many are appalled that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was paraded on the classic perp walk, so he could be photographed in handcuffs. The custom is indisputably unfair to people charged with crimes. The only thing comparable in France might take place annually in Cannes.
Year after year, the director Roman Polanski strolled the red carpet, smiling for the cameras, apparently unworried, and rightly so, that the French authorities would notice that he was a fugitive from justice in Los Angeles, where he had drugged, raped and sodomized a thirteen-year-old girl. The parallel was striking, a prosecutor said. Mr. Polanski, who took his version of the perp walk as a guilty man, lowered the odds that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who took his while presumed innocent, will get bail in New York any time soon.