In my last article, I discussed how security professionals should treat security as a science rather than an art. This is because our goals should be objectively verifiable and should therefore be based on reason, evidence and probability. This, however, is just one half of the story. The other half has to do with the… Read More The Feeling Of Security
I’ll admit it, I have an annoying pet peeve about the security field being described as an art rather than a science. The sentiment in question is that security, protection, intelligence, surveillance detection, etc., can’t be reduced to formulas, equations and lab experiments. There are some general principles, but there aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions. It… Read More It’s Not An Art, It’s A Science
Martial arts is one of those subjects that as soon as you raise them, a weird mood sets in. Some people get oddly self-confident, others get defensive and most exhibit a strange combo of both. It’s almost as if a controversial political questions has been asked. Though I’ve never written about martial arts before, they’ve… Read More Martial Arts Misconceptions
“Fail Often so you can succeed sooner.” —Tom Kelly. Mistakes and failures in surveillance, surveillance detection and special protective operations are things I write about quite frequently. I’ve examined them from every which way, explained how they look, discussed many case studies and talked about how to avoid them. One aspect I haven’t touched on… Read More Big Mistakes & Embarrassing Failures
A version of this article has also been published in Security Solutions Magazine. On the evening of the 19th of December, 2016, the world was shocked as news came out about the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov. Karlov was shot from behind as he was delivering a speech at the Cagdas… Read More A lesson In Diplomatic Protection
I’m very excited to host my first guest blogger on Protection Circle, Travis Lishok. Travis is the owner of EP Nexus, a fantastic executive protection blog that explores protective intelligence, OSINT investigations, threat assessment, and more. Travis and I decided to collaborate by writing two different perspectives on the same event (an actual protective detail… Read More The OSINT Connection: Intelligence In Executive Protection
In recent years, quite a few articles have been published about CEO protection and how much money different corporations spend on it. Forbes might have been the first to get this trend started with this (somewhat dated) article. CNBC discussed the issue back during the healthcare debate, and Fortune Magazine put out a piece about… Read More Protecting The CEO
Surveillance Detection (SD) is thankfully receiving increasing amounts of attention in recent years, as more and more industry professionals (and even some non-industry professionals) are waking up to its potential benefits. As positive as this development is, it does create the need to abolish some misconceptions regarding SD, and to better explain how it can… Read More SD Enabled Security
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
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
