This paper presents a comprehensive personal protection security plan addressing multiple categories of threat. It examines communications security requirements, including signal encryption and cascade alert systems, before turning to terrorist threats such as suicide attacks and chemical or radiological incidents. The paper then considers environmental hazards, using Hurricane Katrina as a case study in logistical preparedness, and analyzes civil unrest and political instability as both direct and indirect threats to protectees. A final section synthesizes these considerations into a unified evacuation and movement protocol. Together, the sections argue that effective security depends on anticipation, pre-planning, and the coordinated integration of intelligence, communications, and logistics.
Effective personal protection requires a comprehensive approach to anticipating, understanding, and preparing for multiple sources of threats to personal safety. Contemporary events have emphasized terrorism in particular, but that emphasis is more a function of human psychology than a reflection of the actual threat terrorism poses relative to natural catastrophes. Many times more human fatalities were attributable to the 2004 Asian-Pacific Tsunami and the flooding of New Orleans than to terrorism.
In addition to threats from terrorism and natural disasters, personal protection agencies must be equally prepared to address threats posed by political unrest and civil disobedience, especially in foreign countries. At a minimum, this entails maintaining secure communications links and protocols for identifying, securing, and relocating all protected individuals within the zone of responsibility.
Communications are essential to personal safety at all times, but especially immediately prior to, during, and immediately after serious safety threats materialize, regardless of their particular origin. The basic technological requirements for personal protection include an independent system that implements appropriately advanced signal scrambling to ensure imperviousness to unauthorized interception that could compromise sensitive information. More sophisticated threats to high-value targets may require counterintelligence electronic spectrum surveillance and offensive signal jamming technology, such as that routinely employed by military security details and the U.S. Secret Service domestically (Larsen 2007).
The basic tactical requirements for ensuring communications include a "cascade" system outlining a chain of critical information dissemination to all personnel within the zone of responsibility. In addition to providing communications hardware throughout the community of remotely located protectees or isolated protective details, the threat response system should also include specific training of all non-security personnel in accessing personal communications equipment and in situational rendezvous at pre-assigned designated areas.
Personal protection always requires thorough, real-time information on any factors that could possibly undermine mobility or, in the most extreme circumstances, require evacuation — such as may arise in foreign territories. Ordinary operational security against isolated acts of terrorism (including abduction and assassination attempts) necessitates using as many appropriate alternate travel routes as possible, in addition to varying other elements that could be surveilled by prospective terrorists. Schedules should remain unpredictable, as should the choice of transportation mode and specific vehicles.
Whereas non-terrorist threats to specific transportation routes are most likely to occur in isolated areas, terrorist attacks may involve a coordinated tactical denial of transportation routes. Personal protection agents must therefore be prepared in advance to respond to every conceivable scenario involving the denial of a transportation route, whether purposefully caused or arising indirectly from a terrorist attack. Ideally, protection agents should train regularly to respond to necessary route changes so that doing so never requires ad hoc procedures or route selection, except in circumstances that could not have been anticipated.
Certain terrorist threats — such as chemical and biological agents, and even radiological or crude nuclear devices — require shelter-in-place responses rather than relocation (Allison 2004). In many foreign countries, the threat of suicide terrorism necessitates a completely different protocol, demanding a heightened state of alertness on the part of protection agents and strict limits on any exposure of protectees to the public. The particular danger of suicide terrorism is that an attack is conceivably possible virtually any time protectees come within close proximity of the general public (Hoffman 2003).
Public access to protectees should always be minimized to whatever extent possible, but in certain situations it is impossible or highly impractical to eliminate that risk entirely. In such cases, protection agents must maintain perimeter surveillance from strategic vantage points that allow them to monitor the public visually for apparent threat indicators. Spectrum-wide electronic frequency surveillance is also necessary to identify communications linked to hostile intentions.
"Disaster preparedness and logistical planning lessons"
"Direct and indirect threats from instability and martial law"
"Coordinated evacuation integrating all security elements"
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