Towards the end of every year, there’s a fantastic Close Protection Conference which is organized by the International Protective Security Board (IPSB). In the conference a couple of years ago, I was hugely honored to do a ‘Tac-Talk’ (think TED Talk, just for security professionals) about surveillance detection, and I thought it might be a good… Read More Let’s Talk About Surveillance Detection
The private security sector is often referred to as a solution-based industry. Clients with security concerns hire security professionals who provide security solutions. But a strange issue I often find is that many people (both in and out of the industry) don’t give enough thought to what the solutions are for. In other words, what… Read More Solving The Security Equation
One of the most important yet often overlooked factors in high-end private sector protective operations is the sale. By this, I’m not just talking about the acquisition of new clients but the general idea of getting the right decision-makers to sign onto your program – and to be willing to pay for it. One of… Read More Executive Security Presentations
I recently got a chance to talk with Alex Fox on The Capable Civilian podcast. Our conversation covered a whole range of topics, including (at the very end) an unofficial announcement about the book I’ve been working on, which I hope will be out in early 2017. Get my new book, Surveillance Zone now! Go… Read More The Capable Civilian Podcast
September, 2012. A cafe in Palo Alto, California*. Two men were sitting at a table and talking. One of the men was a former sales executive who had very recently been let go by a global IT corporation. The other man was the CEO and founder of that corporation, who had agreed to meet with… Read More Covert Operations – Lessons And Applications
In this article, I’m going to discuss various ways in which people can protect themselves from hostile surveillance. The first thing to understand here is that hostile surveillance isn’t in and of itself the top threat you should be worried about. Surveillance is no more than an information collection tool, it’s what the information is… Read More Surveillance Evasion
This article will introduce a number of techniques to detect if someone is conducting surveillance on you. Before we get started, I want to make it clear that my knowledge and experience in this come from the private sector, and not from any clandestine government agency work. Though the principles and techniques I’ll be discussing… Read More How To Detect if You’re Under Surveillance
Since the term Visual Control can mean different things to different people, let’s start by defining what I mean by it here. I define visual control as the ability of an operator to visually keep track of an area of interest – usually an Outer Circle to a property of interest. It’s not that you’re… Read More Visual Control
Probably the only thing Munich got right about real-world covert operations – the boring necessities of receipts and expense statements…
The following are ten hands-on, field leadership principles that I have personally found to be very useful for private sector security operations. Not only have I successfully applied these leadership principles myself, I have also taught them to other field leaders, and watched how they too have had success with them. These principles come from… Read More 10 leadership Principles For Security Operations
