When I used to consult for large organizations to advise their employees how to stay out of harm's way in dangerous places, the primary concern was travel to unstable countries. Today, similar worries extend to places like shopping malls, yet some of the advice from my corporate engagement was equally welcome by a concerned shopper with fears springing from the mall shooting in Kenya. Here are three of my top ten tips that apply to the situation we all face today.
Rule 1: Always go in the direction opposite trouble rather than toward it.
Rationale: People are curious creatures. Our natural inclination on hearing some commotion is to approach its source to see what is going on. For personal security, this can be a deadly mistake. Bodyguards learn to stay focused on their principal, no matter what noise or distractions are taking place. They train themselves to make protection their overriding priority, to move the protectee safely away. Similarly, the noise of gunfire should not magnetize but repel you. While the naive cannot help but be drawn to the commotion, making themselves targets in the process, smart survivors react by getting out of harm's way.
Rule 2: Trust your instincts about danger. Looking silly beats getting hurt.
Rationale: Humans process some clues faster subliminally than via time-consuming application of logic. A story in Gift of Fear, for example, recounts how a woman who was carjacked outside an ATM experienced a feeling of unease while waiting for her boyfriend to withdraw his cash as he left the engine running and the car unlocked. Only after debriefing did the woman realize that what had triggered her visceral anxiety was that she saw a glimpse of an approaching figure wearing jeans -- the carjacker -- but had not had the luxury of time to reason out that her instincts had activated because her boyfriend was not wearing jeans that day. The point is that if she had trusted her instincts without delay, she would have locked the car with the push of a button instead of experiencing a tense encounter with a dangerous villain. The same applies in cases where people routinely override their instincts for fear of appearing silly or prejudicial, as when stepping into an elevator occupied by a hulking derelict or gang of kids. People do this all the time because they don't want to appear judgmental or to look silly and waste time taking the stairs or another elevator. But silly is better than hurt or dead. Isn't it better to defer your shopping, lose your place in line, and get rapidly out of Dodge at the onset of a mall shooting than to linger or worry about how silly you may look if overreacting? Considering the respective worst case scenarios, looking silly still trumps getting shot.
Rule 3: Move, move, move.
Rationale: This was a favorite tip from a friend and colleague I had lost touch with for over 20 years until finding him training executives and their chauffeurs outside the U.S. in how to use their armored limousine to avoid being killed or taken hostage. (Chauffeurs in particular needed more training, because their knee-jerk reaction was to avoid scratching the limo.) His point was that, outside of the movies, few adversaries have a Plan B. They prepare one main attack and generally stick to it. If you can disrupt that plan by getting away from the target area, in the vast majority of cases you will get away and the attackers will not keep after you. Besides, in the case of a mall massacre, the chances are that you are not being targeted specifically. In the terrorists' minds, any casualty is as good as another, and numbers count. Your objective, then, is to avoid being one of those numbers. Move quickly. You need not be as fast as an Olympic sprinter. You just have to be faster than the next victim who hesitates or wanders unthinkingly into the line of fire.
Bottom Line: Survival begins in the mind. There is always something that you can do to improve the odds in your favor.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Navy Yard Shooter's Background Check: Who Saw It Last?
The latest effort to point the accusing finger of blame at the contractor performing the background investigation of Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis misses a critical point. The quality of any background investigation is no better than what the recipient of the data does with this information. And the ultimate decider using such an investigation to grant or withhold a security clearance is a government employee, not a contractor. This is an undelegable duty that government employees reserve for themselves, on the oft-touted and logically defended argument that there are some duties not to be passed on to the private sector.
Not that this argument is infallible. After all, when it comes to most work in the national security space, the people doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes come from the same gene pool and are more alike than they are different. One day they may be career government employees. The next day they may be contractors. In either case, adjudicators who review discrepant data surfaced by background checks to make a determination on whether to grant a security clearance do not need a corporate paycheck to make a mistake. Inertia, bureaucracy, and insufficient scrutiny surely do not bypass government offices to infect only the private sector. Indeed, private companies like background investigation firms have the wherewithal to inoculate themselves at least somewhat against bureaucratic ineptitude. They can fire incompetents. Government counterparts only sigh wistfully when daydreaming of imposing such involuntary career events in their work force.
Nevertheless, some mistakes and systemic failures infect the public and private sectors with equal regularity. One such instance is a chronic failure to do something about aberrant behavior on two fronts. One front is to simply use the tools available for what they were intended. A security clearance is not supposed to be a right or entitlement. It is and should be something for which one qualifies. Instability, insubordination, and multiple encounters with police associated with threatening behavior supply ample justification for withholding or at least suspending a security clearance. And while a security focal point in the private sector may have a hand in reporting such data to the government, the one responsible for doing something remains a government employee. The responsibility does not stop there.
This is the second front. One could argue that everyone working with or routinely encountering Alexis who witnessed his troubling behavior had some kind of obligation to do something, but what? A co-worker, whether a Navy employee or contractor could be obliged to approach management or security to report concerns about a potential threat to the workplace. Failure analysis will likely unearth stories of warning signs neglected or unaddressed by those with the power to intervene. What will the accused fall back on to excuse their failure to act?
Privacy. Confidentiality of medical information or personnel data. Individual employee rights. Fear of lawsuits arising from wrongful discharge or from allegations of discrimination. There is a common thread tying all such excuses. It is the loss of perspective which follows when organizations focus on individual rights at the expense of the more basic interests of the larger employee population.
Sure, no individual should be unfairly treated by being denied a clearance or fired from a job without good reason. However, in the knee-jerk emphasis of fairness and liability avoidance, organizations often lose sight of the larger consequences. And so, letting Alexis keep his security clearance, sweeping his threatening behavior under the rug of privacy or employee rights, and passing the buck for his next employer to handle what appeared to be chronic personal problems that were only getting worse -- all this becomes the default at work. And this is why it is ethically unsupportable to point the accusing finger of blame at a single contractor. Lots of fingers remain for pointing elsewhere.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Not that this argument is infallible. After all, when it comes to most work in the national security space, the people doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes come from the same gene pool and are more alike than they are different. One day they may be career government employees. The next day they may be contractors. In either case, adjudicators who review discrepant data surfaced by background checks to make a determination on whether to grant a security clearance do not need a corporate paycheck to make a mistake. Inertia, bureaucracy, and insufficient scrutiny surely do not bypass government offices to infect only the private sector. Indeed, private companies like background investigation firms have the wherewithal to inoculate themselves at least somewhat against bureaucratic ineptitude. They can fire incompetents. Government counterparts only sigh wistfully when daydreaming of imposing such involuntary career events in their work force.
Nevertheless, some mistakes and systemic failures infect the public and private sectors with equal regularity. One such instance is a chronic failure to do something about aberrant behavior on two fronts. One front is to simply use the tools available for what they were intended. A security clearance is not supposed to be a right or entitlement. It is and should be something for which one qualifies. Instability, insubordination, and multiple encounters with police associated with threatening behavior supply ample justification for withholding or at least suspending a security clearance. And while a security focal point in the private sector may have a hand in reporting such data to the government, the one responsible for doing something remains a government employee. The responsibility does not stop there.
This is the second front. One could argue that everyone working with or routinely encountering Alexis who witnessed his troubling behavior had some kind of obligation to do something, but what? A co-worker, whether a Navy employee or contractor could be obliged to approach management or security to report concerns about a potential threat to the workplace. Failure analysis will likely unearth stories of warning signs neglected or unaddressed by those with the power to intervene. What will the accused fall back on to excuse their failure to act?
Privacy. Confidentiality of medical information or personnel data. Individual employee rights. Fear of lawsuits arising from wrongful discharge or from allegations of discrimination. There is a common thread tying all such excuses. It is the loss of perspective which follows when organizations focus on individual rights at the expense of the more basic interests of the larger employee population.
Sure, no individual should be unfairly treated by being denied a clearance or fired from a job without good reason. However, in the knee-jerk emphasis of fairness and liability avoidance, organizations often lose sight of the larger consequences. And so, letting Alexis keep his security clearance, sweeping his threatening behavior under the rug of privacy or employee rights, and passing the buck for his next employer to handle what appeared to be chronic personal problems that were only getting worse -- all this becomes the default at work. And this is why it is ethically unsupportable to point the accusing finger of blame at a single contractor. Lots of fingers remain for pointing elsewhere.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
"Won't listen? Then feel" Foreign Policy
I wrote these notes before Russia's Putin commandeered the world's stage about Syria. The press of other matters delayed posting, but my friend and colleague, Mark, read what follows and said it reminded him of his own father's approach to deterring undesired activity. If you won't listen, you will just have to feel consequences. No protracted debates. No soapbox sermons. Thanks for a more memorable subject line than something with the word lessons in it, Mark.
-----
Ah, the tumultuous Middle East, where villains savage their own rival tribes and issue death threats with all the gusto of a thespian preening for a debut on Broadway. How does one put the noise into context? Consider some events from recent history:
Hostile Talk
- During the Six-Day War, the Egyptian Air Force was proudly announcing air superiority of its fighter aces as Israel was neutering Egyptian air power.
- Circa 1986, as tensions between Libya and the U.S. spiked after a Libyan-sponsored bombing of U.S. servicemen in a nightclub outside an American military base, Qaddafi announced a "line of death" which, if crossed, would mean complete devastation for American forces. The latter bombed Qaddafi into silence, after narrowly missing him in an air strike that killed his son and obliterated any subsequent talk of lines of death.
Meaningful Action
- Earlier this year, after catching Syria in the act of arming Hezbollah with weapons whose target would only be Israel, Israel bombed weapons caches in Syria without fanfare or hesitation. Syria expressed outrage but knew better than to attack Israel in retaliation. Nor did war rhetoric follow from either side.
- In the days when kidnappings of journalists and diplomats were common fears in Beirut, legend has it that one terrorist group tried its hand with abducting a Soviet official. The Russians, as the story goes, did not engage in media pleas for release or hostage negotiations. Instead, they found the first relative traceable to the instigator, his nephew, and sent the nephew's private parts in a package to the instigator. The Soviet hostage was then released without fanfare or rhetorical exchanges in the press.
Lessons
Deterrence still works, but perhaps in inverse ratio to proclamation and palaver. Action still speaks louder than words, and sometimes loudest when uncluttered with words. In the foregoing cases of the Israelis and Russians, one may only wonder if the reaction by those on the receiving end was not something like, "Well, no one ever explained it that way to us before."
Even the French get this, which is why they see no double standard in calling us cowboys if we move without coalitions, United Nations' blessings, and favorable press. Meanwhile, whenever France perceives a threat to its interests in Congo, Algeria, or Mali, the French definition of nanosecond becomes the degree of hesitation they experience in worrying about such imprimaturs before sending in their expeditionary forces. And those forces go in, gloves off, to do a job -- not to send a message.
-- Nick Catrantzos
-----
Ah, the tumultuous Middle East, where villains savage their own rival tribes and issue death threats with all the gusto of a thespian preening for a debut on Broadway. How does one put the noise into context? Consider some events from recent history:
Hostile Talk
- During the Six-Day War, the Egyptian Air Force was proudly announcing air superiority of its fighter aces as Israel was neutering Egyptian air power.
- Circa 1986, as tensions between Libya and the U.S. spiked after a Libyan-sponsored bombing of U.S. servicemen in a nightclub outside an American military base, Qaddafi announced a "line of death" which, if crossed, would mean complete devastation for American forces. The latter bombed Qaddafi into silence, after narrowly missing him in an air strike that killed his son and obliterated any subsequent talk of lines of death.
Meaningful Action
- Earlier this year, after catching Syria in the act of arming Hezbollah with weapons whose target would only be Israel, Israel bombed weapons caches in Syria without fanfare or hesitation. Syria expressed outrage but knew better than to attack Israel in retaliation. Nor did war rhetoric follow from either side.
- In the days when kidnappings of journalists and diplomats were common fears in Beirut, legend has it that one terrorist group tried its hand with abducting a Soviet official. The Russians, as the story goes, did not engage in media pleas for release or hostage negotiations. Instead, they found the first relative traceable to the instigator, his nephew, and sent the nephew's private parts in a package to the instigator. The Soviet hostage was then released without fanfare or rhetorical exchanges in the press.
Lessons
Deterrence still works, but perhaps in inverse ratio to proclamation and palaver. Action still speaks louder than words, and sometimes loudest when uncluttered with words. In the foregoing cases of the Israelis and Russians, one may only wonder if the reaction by those on the receiving end was not something like, "Well, no one ever explained it that way to us before."
Even the French get this, which is why they see no double standard in calling us cowboys if we move without coalitions, United Nations' blessings, and favorable press. Meanwhile, whenever France perceives a threat to its interests in Congo, Algeria, or Mali, the French definition of nanosecond becomes the degree of hesitation they experience in worrying about such imprimaturs before sending in their expeditionary forces. And those forces go in, gloves off, to do a job -- not to send a message.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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