Welcome to Spycraft, a podcast that tells gripping life and death spy stories and the amazing devices and operations that made them possible.

Now let's get started.

Welcome back everybody today, we have a great show.

We're going to be talking about a new book, The Protective Intelligence Advantage Mitigating the Rising Threat to prominent People.

With us today is Scott Stewart, former Army tactical intelligence officer.

He's been fifteen years at Stratford and he's the VP of Protective Intelligence at torch Stone Global.

VP of Protective Intelligence at torch Stone Global.

Definitely look it up.

Also with us today is co author Fred Burton.

He's the author of another great book we interviewed a while back ago called Beirute Rules.

He's a former police officer and special agent and together they've combined on this new book, The Protective intelli Leigence Advantage.

Before we get started, you know.

What to do, share, subscribe, hit that I like, but you know we like it, and let's not waste any more time.

I'm going to show Scott and Frey Welcome, gentlemen.

Hey, thanks for having us.

Carlos, thanks for having us.

Thank you very much for being here and thank you both for your service as well.

Thanks so hok, you have a lot of knowledge in this field.

What got you motivated to write this book now?

I think just you know, you look at the headlines and when we see what's you know, happening lately, whether it was the Brian Thompson assassination you know in New York, whether it was the attacks in Minneapolis, whether it's you know, just these the attacks we're seeing and stocking of influencers.

There's really a need for protective intelligence now more than ever.

And it's not enough just to have goons with guns around, you know, that's always reactive.

So what we're trying to do is to help security teams become proactive, to be able to get ahead of the threat curve and basically stay left to the boom.

And Carlos, just for the background of your audience, you know, Scott and I were part of the original group that put together the Protective Intelligence Division at the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service in the eighties, and we were the first to bring that model to the private sector.

And so over the years we've written about it at Strategic Forecasting, STRAT four and Scott's written about it extensively at towards Stone Global, and certainly after the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO.

The timing was we thought was right for us to collaborate and hopefully try to keep people safe and have folks look at this problem and understand the general threat landscape.

Interesting that also reminds me the issue we were starting to have with docsing and seeing that how dangerous that is, and with the Homeland Security Christy nom that was kind of wild, and how they docks here because it's no joke, but some of them, I'm assuming I like to call them LARPers, so they life action, real role player, whatever they call them, and that's pretty dangerous.

Staff.

We actually have a whole chapter in this chapter thirteen on don't docs yourself, because one of the things that we recommend to our readers and to our clients is that they subscribe to an information removal company to help take down a lot of the information that's on the Internet, especially with the data aggregators, because it is dangerous and it is easy to get profiles on people, as we show in the book, going all the way back to like the two thousand and three kidnapping of financier Eddie Lampert.

We've seen criminals pulling down these profiles from these data aggregators and using them to target prominent individuals.

We also saw the same thing even recently in those Minnesota political shootings.

The shooter used those services.

So you know, we recommend those those kind of companies, you know, like a three sixty privacy.

But if you're out there doxing yourself by carelessly putting information on social media, all that efforts really wasted.

So you're really bringing down heat on yourself by posting that information carelessly, by not having your you know, accounts locked down on the privacy settings and such, and so you can actually bring a lot of heat and danger onto yourself.

And Carlos, when you think of this from a historical perspective, you know, as someone who writes about incidents, you know, going back to the sixties and seventies.

In nineteen seventy three, you know, we had a cold case involving the political assassination of an Israeli diplomat in my hometown, and the terrorist group that found him just looked in the old school telephone book and he was listed.

So as you fast forward, today, you know, a few clicks of the keyboard and you can pretty much find anybody that you want to find.

Or, as Scott and I reflect in the book, it's so easy for family members to out whatever the CEO is doing or that ultra high net worth person.

You know, on a practical basis, you know, we talk a lot to cops and protectors, and protectors and cops.

Are now in the gun sites.

So it's important for all of us to think about that and to try to eliminate that personal privacy information that's out there.

And there's some great companies out there that can do that for you.

So true, it's so sad now that they're targeting ice agents as well.

It's just kind of wild.

You know.

It also reminds me and if I'm getting out of myself or if I if you're too far off to bringing back in.

But it reminded me.

A lot of the baseball players lately.

I don't know if any other sport I think basketball, Yeah, go.

Ahead, everybody.

We've seen it in Europe with the soccer players, soccer players in South America and being kidnapped, and it's kind of a global problem.

And there again a lot of the stems from self doxing.

They're not being careful what they're putting on their social media.

And we even saw the NFL put down a notice after Joe Burrow, the quarterback of.

The Bengals, had his residence burgled.

Basically warning them, you know, be careful what you're putting, because what they were doing is showing, you know, kind of their bling, showing off what they had, but then they were also showing kind of where it was kept within the residence.

Some of the video would show, you know, the home security system kind of allowing the burglars to know exactly what was there, where it was, and what was protecting it.

So you wait till the uh, you know, the person's out of town, or you do what happened to the former Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman, and he actually had his home invasion at his house while his wife and family were still there.

So, you know, these things happen, and a lot of it.

Unfortunately, there again is self doxing.

You know, when we saw that with the Kim Kardashian thing back in twenty sixteen or it was twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen in Paris, where she was throwing the stuff on Instagram showing where she was staying, all the jewels she had with her, and then all of a sudden, those Paris thieves were able to put those dots together, connect the dots and target her at that hotel.

La has been hit hard too lately, as it it Scott.

From the data that you collect there at Torchstone Global.

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of high end robberies.

Some of them are are not necessarily targeted that way.

We're seeing just you know, basically the robbers see a nice house, what were and they'll use things like drones on the house.

They'll set up cameras kind of you know, almost like trail cameras, right, kind of remote cameras.

They'll set those up on the house to try to get the pattern of life down, and then they'll come and you know, try to hit the house when it's unoccupied.

But they're they're they're pretty they can be kind of sophisticated in one hand and the other hand, you know, just pretty straightforward because some of the gangs will try to use things, you know, like jammers uh to jam bluetooth and uh Wi Fi for the alarm systems, But at the same time, they're like smashing in your plate glass window and your sliding glass door with a brick or a spring loaded punch and then trying to get out before the cops can respond to the alarm.

So we're seeing a combination of fairly sophisticated with just pretty straightforward brutal home invasions.

I'm trying to.

Figure out what's the next question, because I have three things that are popping up in my head.

I'm trying to see how I can coordinate thief because one of the things I guess.

I know this is not.

Exactly your field, but with all the years of experience, I'm sure you've either thought of it or having credible insight into it.

It's weird because in today's world things seem to have shifted.

I know dosing is new obviously in the the last twenty five years, but.

The targeting of heroes in a sense right athletes, the targeting of people that you just never thought would target.

It was almost like an unwritten rule.

You don't target these individuals that much.

Or maybe I'm naive.

Or didn't realize that in the past, but I see just so many now where they just target big names and there's like no rules or regulations.

Do you think the criminals have changed.

No, I mean go all the way think about the Limberg baby kidnapping.

You know, there's there's just been this long history of you know, targeting high profile individuals, whether it was in business, whether it's been in sports elsewhere.

So it's really not new, you know, it's it's kind of you know, back to that quote about you know, I robbed banks because it was really Setton allegedly said that, you know, I rob banks because that's where the money's at.

Well, that's that's what we're seeing with you know, these high profile individuals, especially right now with the money.

You know, so back in the day, you know, probably a Ken Anderson as Cincinnati quarterback wasn't making millions and millions of dollars.

But now you fast forward to Joe Burrow and this guy's probably making fifty million dollars a year or whatever.

So that really moves those athletes up that target continuum that way, just because of you know, their their their net worth is so much greater than it was in the past.

Yeah, and that's one of the things we try to do with our book carlos Is put this in perspective and look at it too from a historical aspect of the past attacks and some of the lessons learned.

So, you know, Scott mentioned the Lindbergh baby, but we also had the kidnapping of the heir to the Corps Beer Kingdom, and many others that you know, this has been around for a while and there's some, you know, very hard lessons that can be learned, but then you can have some takeaways as to what you can do about all these kinds of incidents as well.

Yeah, and many of the lessons that we talk about kind of the first part of the book, the first eight chapters are kind of case studies, and of course the first one we did was the Brian Thompson assassination in New York, but we moved through a whole bunch of different types of criminals, types of vignettes to pull out, you know, the important protective intelligence lessons there, and a lot of them are very very applicable to the stuff.

Even some of the historical things, they're very applicable to what we see happening today.

I mean, because one of the things that we talked about in the course kidnapping, of course, was situational awareness and the fact that his kidnapper basically was very, very awkward, and how he conducted.

His pre operational surveillance.

I mean, he had a bright yellow car that he parked at the attack site.

He's out in the middle of the country, dressed in city clothes with a fedora and a suit.

You know, just he had no cover for status, no cover for action at all.

He stood out, but nobody was paying attention.

And really that's what we see happening a lot now.

I think that people don't understand that, by and large, criminals still have very bad tradecraft when it comes to things like surveillance.

The reason they're able to succeed is because nobody's looking for him.

And Fred and I during our careers, you know, over the last four decades, have had a number of instances where we've been working surveillance detection details and we've been able to pick up on hostile behavior just because of those demeanor mistakes, just because of plain old lurking or you know what we call jdl R.

Right, it just doesn't look right.

And you know, if people would pay more attention to what's going on around them, you know, they could really avoid a lot of these criminals.

Yeah, you can't find surveillance unless you're looking for it.

But you know, there are some basic things that everybody can do.

And what we've tried to do with the book too, is is focus on those things that a chief security officer can do to help either protect a company or a executive could do to help protect himself or herself or their families.

Again, the name of the book is The Protective Intelligence Advantage Mitigating the Rising Threat to Prominent People by Fred Burton and Scott Stewart.

Public by CRC Presso check it out, folks.

Okay, still a lot of questions, but I'm gonna go ahead and reduce this I'll tell you, or I'll start wrapping it up on the dosing and social media site.

I just want to get this question out of the way.

It's kind of interesting too that it also made me think of how people used to flaunt their jewelry, as Scott mentioned, and now I hear some people that I know that are worth quite a bit a lot more than me, Andre worth millions of dollars, and they just no, I can't wear that's out.

I'm looking at it so why did you buy it?

I'm thinking this back in my head and I've even asked some of them, why would you buy it anymore?

I mean, all you're really doing is showing it off to whoever comes to your house.

That's pretty much it.

Especially after Beverly Hills.

You know they target all those rolexes a couple of years ago, and it's like, what are you gonna do with it?

You're just gonna go to a party and then go right back and that's it.

I don't know, it's kind of funny in the years before they used to do it.

And I guess my question also is what do you think about these accounts?

And this may be treading a dangerous liner for both of you, but on some of the accounts that give a lot of situational awareness tips, and I guess it made me think about it.

Last night I had a conversation with a former police officer and cold case investigator and we were talking and he was saying, how the TV.

The criminals watch TV shows.

Everybody he interviews in prisons they watch TV shows.

And I'm thinking, I know there's criminals looking at these situational awareness.

Accounts, not your book, but the accounts.

I don't think they're going to work out the money, but on the accounts they'll look at these things and oh, okay, I got to do this, So they don't pay attention to me.

I don't see you guys doing that.

But what do you think about that?

Well, I think it's important that when we're t talking about some of these tradecraft skills, right, they're really more of an art and so I liken it a lot to musicianship.

So I play guitar, you know, I can read books about playing guitar.

I can watch videos, hours of videos about playing guitar.

I can talk to people about playing guitar.

But until I sit down and do it, there's no way I'm going to master it.

And it takes time and effort.

And that's the same thing on the criminal side, with something like surveillance in order.

You know, when Fred and I were going through our surveillance courses, I mean, obviously the stuff we had at Fletsey, the Federal LA Enforcement Training Center, was very rudimentary, but when we did some of the more advanced stuff, I mean it really we're talking weeks and then months and months of practice on the street in order to perfect the craft, and even then you're still dealing with things like burn syndrome in your gut.

You're just able to deal with it.

You learn to deal with it because of that training, because of that practice, because of that petition.

Criminals just don't.

Have the time or really the you know, the energy to deal with it, and they don't need to because they're still able to victimize people because they're careless.

They're not paying attention, and it's denial.

You know.

We talk about situational awareness, but you have the flip side, right, which is is kind of the enemies of situational awareness, and the big one is denial, not me, not here, not now, not him, you know, and that plays into it.

The other one is distraction.

And people are very very very distracted right now, especially with the device in front of their face all the time, so it's very easy for these criminals to target them.

And if you look too, Carlos said, just the general situational awareness of most of America today.

Just drive down the street and look at the folks that are just have their heads buried in their iPhone and they're totally unaware of their surroundings and wherever you might go across the country.

You see it everywhere, and there's.

Just some basic things that if people were just more observant at times, they could see things and let someone know about that, you know what has occurred.

And you know, as cheesy as it may sound, at times, you know, with the DHS kind of alert, you see something, say something you know that works, and most people want to discount it.

It's really kind of an interesting phenomenon.

I recently spoke to a roundtable of chief security officers in Washington, d C.

And after the Brian Thompson murder, there was this rocket ship of just protection on everybody because everybody was nervous.

And now it's been a few.

Months since then and that's been slowly decreasing and executives, you know, are just kind of out of sight and out of mind.

Now with the trial coming up with the assassin Luigi Mangioni, obviously that's going to get back in the news and you know, that could generate copycats, that could generate a renewed focus in that incident and so forth.

So it is a situational awareness aspect, and we hope that our book does some good from that aspect as well.

Want I asked this question, but again, I know I always try to respect the authors too, so I don't want you to give away too much from the book, but it'd be interesting some people when you read it on social media.

Of course, you got a.

Bunch of wannabes and Noah balls and all that other nonsense out there.

But some had argued AMANGIONI was super sophisticated.

Others argued he was lucky.

Others argued, well, I guess all kinds of arguments about him.

Despite seeing Scott's head shaking, it wasn't sophistication.

So what was your take on it?

And I guess, again, don't ruin it for the book, but what was your take on it?

Take it basically, you know, we had kind of denial going on there.

We had a victim who was very comfortable.

He was in an environment where he stayed very frequently, stayed at a hotel just across the street and down about a half a block, and he just felt secure there.

You know, he's a pretty strong guy, you know, former wrestler.

He was kind of the guy that was challenging to people to.

Armor wrestle all the time.

So he felt, you know, he wasn't really worried about being accosted by homeless people anything like that.

But at the same time, he just didn't realize that, you know, some mutt with a gun could walk up behind him and kill him.

And really that's what we see there.

And that's also the concern, is that we see that assassination as being a blueprint for others to follow.

It's basically saying that anybody can do it, even if you have no training, just because of this lack of awareness and this carelessness.

And so, you know, one of the things that the Fred and I have seen over the years is you do have these peaks and valleys with security.

Right, something happens, you know, security gets ramped up, people pay attention, but then after a while, things don't happen, and you see that trickle down, attention wanes, funds programs go away, and then you have the next you know event, And I'm concerned that, you know, the further we get away from some of these attacks, although I mean, we did have an uptick after you know, the Minnesota attacks and then of course the NFL attack, but still as as we have you know, more and more time lapses, I think we're going to see that complacency start to sneak in again, and of course with that complacency comes the denial and the ability just to kind of go back to business as normal, and then you have those vulnerabilities creeping up again.

And you look at for example, the Minnesota incident was just downright frightening, you know, with an individual that was in the security business, so he understands that, he understands how law enforcement responds.

He's dressed as a cop and he knocks on the door of homes that are not protected, and you put yourself in that kind of perspective and think about how many people would just open the door.

And so those are the kinds of incidents that with our book, The Protective Intelligence Advantage, we're hoping that we're just going to help folks raise their situational awareness, understand the threat landscape, understand what's on the horizon, what could be next, and learn from some of these horrific case studies that have taken place in the past.

You know, our industry, Carlos has been greatly influenced by tragedy.

Meaning Scott and I were hired as special agents with the State Department predicated upon the horrific embassy bombings in the Middle East, predominantly in the eighties, and that industry has always been driven by that kind of tragedy.

And there is this boom or bust or feast or famine, however you want to describe it.

And we just want to make sure that with the assassination of Brian Thompson the upcoming trial, that it's not going to generate additional Luigi Mangiones that could say if he could get away with that, I can too.

And then you just look at I don't know where we are, and you are probably better suited, Carlos, to explain this than Scott and I.

But when you look at this phenomena out there, with this relationship now with Mangioni that there's folks out there that believe he did a good thing, which neither of us can fathom.

But the support network that's kicked in for him has just been frightening.

Yeah.

That goes to something we talk about in the book, Carlos, that we call the social media threat continuum too, and we talk about how with the advent of the Internet and our social media and the connectedness that's there, it's really made a way for people with grievances, and whether that's a racial grievance, religious grievance, you know, even even at business grievance, whatever.

It's allowed these grievance collectors and you know, these extremists to kind of network together, and it's allowed the kind of the emergence of what we call these extremist influencers to get up there, to articulate the grievances and the conspiracies and then to identify and vilify, you know, the denounce basically targets.

And then we see the dosing, we see the harassment, and you know, eventually the physical attacks.

So there's this whole continuum there that's coming out of this the social media in a way that's that's very disturbing right now.

And there again, that's one of the reasons that you know, now more than ever, we really believe you need protective intelligence to help you understand what's out there, to get a grip on the threats, and then to help you stay ahead of them, because otherwise it's just hopeless right now with the amount of information that's out there and the ability of these threat acts to kind of you know, kind of recruit radicalize and then operationalize people over the Internet, and we see kind of you know, extremists of all stripes, right that giehaties are doing that, the white supremacists are doing that, the anarchists are doing that, the in cells are doing that.

So it's it's it's not you know, dependent on any one ideology.

And I just think that we're in this phase right now where we're going to see more and more of these kind of loan individuals with these grievances targeting prominent individuals.

Great, right, the.

Book again is the Protective Intelligence Advantage Mitigating the rising threat to prominent people.

Fret Berdon and Scott Stewart are the authors.

Well, now you kind of got me thinking, not a good thing, and I'm kind of trying to combine these three things together.

Media reading books, which is back to your line earlier about people.

You can read a book about something and not be able to do it.

And I think that it made me think about what you guys were saying in regards to the Mangioni where a lot of people came out either reading books and situational awareness or how to attack somebody or whatever it is, and then they thought they knew how this guy figured it all out.

But the media is also to blame a.

Lot, I think, not just social media, but even the media within social media, because they like this, they like to create the drama, and I get it, right, they need the clicks, they need the views.

I get it.

It doesn't mean it's right, but they do a lot of that, right.

They trickle in, they create these possible theories out of nothing, and then everybody starts watching like it's law and order, or at least used to be in the old days, and they're following these cases and what could this have happened?

Could this have happened?

And then the media trickles something else out that they probably already knew hours before or days before, but they trickle it out to create a storyline like a TV show of a real murder, which is insane to me because it's becoming this it's becoming a TV show when it's actually realc people are dying.

And yet you'll see this little trend that they do, and it gets all these people kind of looking at it and trying to figure it out, and everybody's everybody's the joker in Batman.

And then when you figure it out now it was just a schlep.

Somebody maybe wound seeing a Clue Zone movie and that was about the end of it.

So it's really bizarre to me how that's happening.

I don't know any thoughts on that.

About a little ramp.

Well, you have to you have to fill those twenty four to seven hours of news coverage with something, and you know, you have to sell the advertising, and so the hotter the better, and if it bleeds, it leads.

H That's historically worked and it's still true so that when we do have these tragedies, obviously they do take over and everything, and you know, it goes back to the old days.

You think about the old days, uh, when some of the cases that we were talking about now, of course, like the Lindberg the course, some of those big high profile cases got a lot.

But I think even back into like the you know, the sixties and seventies, you had all these bombings going on in the United States by groups like the Weather Underground, like the Puerto Rican Separatists and some of these others, and they didn't get any press hardly at all.

They would maybe get a paragraph or something on the front page and then a little bit more deeper in when we had a half hour national newscast, they had to fit everything in a little little so they didn't have time to really focus and go crazy.

On these specific attacks.

And so really that twenty.

Four to seven news coverage, along with the social media, has really hyped up all this stuff.

Of course, that's why we have that right now.

There's kind of an interesting contradiction in society where murder rates are actually lower than they were, say a ninety one, but people feel more exposed and kind of more fearful despite murder rates being down.

But it's because every murders covered now and it's everywhere you know, on your social media, it's on the twenty four to seven news, and so the stuff is hyped up a lot more, you know, than it was in previous times, quieter times.

And Carlos, I mean even when we started as young agents.

I mean I I had a couple of cases, one in Khartoon and one in Sona in eighty six where two of our diplomats were shot by a terrorist group and it was I think we got maybe two lines in the New York Times, you know, diplomat shot overseas and that was it, and you know, it's really kind of interesting from that development from a news cycle.

I mean, the Munich massacre in nineteen seventy two was the first terrorist incident that was covered and you know globally live when Black September, you know, took the eleven Israeli hostages.

But you can also look at events, you know, I vividly recall like being at the Olympics in Atlanta when doing protection for all the athletes there and we had the bombing and CNN covered it, But even an incident like that did not get the scope of the kind of coverage that.

You would see today.

You know, just the evolution of that news cycle.

So you know, the Mangioni effect now and you know, to harken back to that case, which you know we cover in detail in chapter one in our book, is you know, you have these deck of cards, deck of enemy cards.

You have all these CEOs that have been threatened and just putting this big target on their backs as a result of what Mangioni has done.

And it's really been a watershed event for corporate security to manage those kinds of threats today and you know, for for just the benefit of your audience.

You know, when when Scott and I first got in this business, you know, we were lucky to manage threats, you know, with three by five index car arts, and you know today or Excel spreadsheets.

You know if today you can only manage those threats with technology solutions.

So that's been a huge evolution in our industry as well.

It's interesting.

I'm a superhero fan.

It would be a strange twist on this, but I see a lot of the themes you mentioned this earlier, Fred, I think when you were asking, or at least kind of asking about the Maggioni effect, right, it seemed like a lot of those anti capitalism and revenge for being greedy or whatever whatever they wanted to say.

But I remember watching some of the latest TV shows or movies in the Martin in the superhero world, and that's a theme.

That's a theme right there.

Go after the CEO, they're the greedy person.

I don't want to name shows in case I get nailed for something, but there's a couple of shows that watched it where the dad was a CEO and then the superhero had a fight against this evil guy who had all this money, and other shows now were the one guys who rules the whole entire Hell's Kitchen.

I think it is down in New York, and he's not.

It was the Hell's Kitchen ridiculous.

He was.

He was running everything down there.

And he's a big wig too, with the CEO of a company.

So it's it's funny because they're they're The theme continues, it continues on really strange.

But let me.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting today with Trump is kind of fascinating, just because Trump has great a vibe that we haven't seen for several years now, which is pro law enforcement.

I think intentionally or unintentionally, he's given.

A lot of purpose to young men.

We've seen a lot of articles over the last five years by young males not knowing what to do with their lives.

We've seen a huge decline in them going to college and either going to becoming welders or plumbers or electricians.

But look, every job is going to max out sooner or later.

But now in law enforcement, I mean, it's so big that has such an enormous amount of applications going on.

Does that have an impact for you?

And then after that we're going to start looking at a little bit more in depth of the book.

What do you think, Well, I'll be happy to tackle that.

You know, it's it's something that is fascinating to both of us when you know, we've dissected so many assassination attempts and actual assassinations over the years, both in the government and outside the government, that you look at the incident, for example, in Butler, and you know, as a student of protection history, you have you know, the Kennedy assassination, and one of the huge takeaways in the Warrant Commission was that you needed to have better protective research, better intelligence research, and how about you know, counter sniper teams.

So you get counter sniper teams that gets created specifically to neutralize that kind of threat.

And so as you dissect Butler, there was so many mistakes that were made.

You know, there was a protective intelligence advance there.

To the best of our knowledge, this shooter was not known, or at least if he was known, that's not been publicly released thus far.

But was he known to other entities inside of let's say, the Joint Terrorism Task Force umbrellas.

So you know, there's so many things you can look at from that aspect, you know, but your question on Butler, for me centers on two major failure points.

One is that certainly was a very poor advance.

Love to know what Scott thinks.

You know, we've done the grunt work in our years gone by.

There was certainly not enough resources on site.

Why that rooftop was not covered, for the life of me, I don't know.

You know, that's basic agent work one oh one, you know.

But at the end of the day, the Trump detail, you know, in Butler, did not have the same amount of resources that the Biden detail had the Presidential Protection Division for reasons that were only made at Secret Service headquarters.

Well, you're never going to have that for a candidate, you know.

And that's just the reality with the Secret Service and how they operate the A teams on potus all the time.

You have kind of the B team then going on the family down into the VP insich.

But during a campaign season, the Secret Service gets stretched super thin because they have to start covering the candidates, and these candidates have multiple steps, multiple stops every day.

So I'm not really familiar how many stops Trump had before and scheduled before and after Butler, but I would assume it was many and so what happens is everything gets divided out.

And in some ways it was similar to what would happen to US at DS and end of Secret Service a little bit at the U in General Assembly, where we might have thirty protective details going at any one time, and you just you know, for US at those times on those foreign ministers, we did not have the same number of agents that we would say on the Secretary of State, And really a lot of times we were borrowing agents from the US Marshall Service, from ATF, from other organizations to kind of help bulk up the details because we didn't have enough bodies to stab them because of what's going on.

And that really happens a lot to the Secret Service during campaign season.

At the same time, you know, they're assigning people to tasks to go out and do things who probably ordinarily wouldn't be put in charge of a major event.

So I'm sure that that advanced agent that did the Butler County Fair was in charge of all that planning, probably would not have been selected for a pota's trip to Pittsburgh or something, you know, And so they were just trying to find a body somewhere to put you know, to take this role and to take this responsibility, and so you really don't have your best agents doing that at that point.

And I think that that probably, you know, some of the firings that we've seen and some of the repercussions that have rolled downhill after the Butler incident seemed to kind of reflect that.

So, you know, at the one point you can understand too, it kind of goes back to us talking about earlier about complacency.

Right, nothing's happened, nothing's happened, nothing happened, So it's okay if we send this agent to do this advance because nothing's going to happen here.

It's it's a quiet little farm town outside of Pittsburgh, you know, don't worry about it.

Yeah, and then the protection business, since Scott raises some tremendous points, Carlos, it doesn't matter until it does.

But when it does matter, usually there is a disaster.

And you know, I started with the Secret Service, and you know, one of the takeaways after Hinkley shot President Reagan was that the Secret Service was going to no longer rely on the local police, for example, to watch the press pen where Hinkley popped out of forever going forward, they were going to include the Secret Service Uniform Division to do that job.

So the Secret Service adapts very well after tragedy.

And you know, the protective intelligence model really started out of the Warren Commission, one of the with with all its thoughts, It came out of the Warren Commission that recognized that you need to do better research into localized threat actors wherever they might be, and there had to be a centralized database and so forth.

So the Secret Service has done a huge course correction since Butler.

I think that you know, it still is, you know, a tremendous protective agency.

We have a lot of friends there.

We work with a lot of colleagues that came from there, so you know, they won't get things right.

But it also takes support from the top.

You know, I can't tell you enough.

You know, we've Scott and I have lived through enough tragedy to know that budgets get whacked, you know, agent assignments get get reduced, and that really affects your morale when you're out there, because the job at times is extraordinarily difficult.

I mean, you know, we both stood in front of buildings or doorways at three am in the morning and there's literally nothing going on.

Nothing, And it's a very difficult job at times.

And if you're doing this year in and year out, and you're doing it on holidays, you're doing it on weekends, you know, it's you're you're really out there all the time and you're very rarely home.

So there's a lot of problems as a result of that.

As well.

It reminds me a lot of being an outfielder and just kind of sitting out there when you have a strikeout pitcher and hey, something's.

Coming now, I got a move.

Yeah, And I guess there's I know some look.

I guess there was a weird situation there with the Trump and the Butler incident that there's going to be some conspiracy people.

But I assume by now Trump would have come out if he saw something.

I'm assuming he would have noticed it and made a public by now, I don't know.

I know he is investigating that whole incident.

I know one thing, and I Scott and I have actually not talked about this, but uh, I find it very unusual that that threat actor had so many burner phones, uh that we've seen, you know, I've seen as many as twelve.

And you know, granted, he just might have been a mentally disturbed individual that has watched one too many spy movie in a CHOI all those for whatever purposes he might have, but I really would like to see what's contained on those burner phones.

That's just me.

I don't know, what do you think, Scotty?

Yeah, I think it would be interesting to you know, and I'm sure that eventually more will come out.

Kind of on his background, on his rationale and his reasoning.

But it's kind of interesting to me that the initial reports were that he wasn't necessarily even you know, like politically motivated towards targeting Trump, but he just wanted to go after a fat target.

It was going to get him attention.

So it's more of it like an attention seeking thing, which I find is interesting.

But there again, it kind of plays into the whole social media thing.

You know, he wanted to become famous, Internet famous.

You know, it's fifteen minutes of fame by doing an infamous act, which is just another scary reason, you know what.

It's so necessary to stay on top of these threats and to practice you know, very good situational awareness and not to allow complacency, and then I all to slip in and the.

One thing, Carlos, it really kind of dovetails back to our book as well as these threat actors will look at multiple targets, which literally gets lost in the course of history.

You can go back to Sirhan.

Sirhan even he looked at other targets.

Chapman who shot Lennon looked at other targets, Hinkley looked at other targets, and that's not unusual.

And you know, it was recently disclosed that Mangioni also.

Looked at another target.

So you know that's natural as a part of these air quote assassins to do that, and they'll take advantage of that target of opportunity.

And that's just part of what we talk about in the in the book too when we really outline how the attack cycle works.

When we talk about that, you know, the target identification and then target target selection, and we go through that in several of the case studies, and then we unpack it a little bit later when we talk about how threat actors work.

That the protective model you were mentioned.

Hm uh no, Actually that well, that that's more those are models that we use for understanding how threat actors work.

So we kind of have that attack cycle model, which initially was kind of developed as the terrorist attack cycle, you know, back in the day.

Uh, but then we've really uh expanded it to show how it really applies to all targeted attacks.

Uh.

The same thing with you know, the criminals all follow that same attack cycle.

Uh, they'll do it differently depending what kind of criminal we're talking about, you know, a stocking criminal versus an ambush criminal, so a bank robber versus a rapist, but still they're they're still going through those same steps and so it's really a useful model to help understand, you know, how how criminals work.

Of course, another one is the pathway to violence.

That is a very helpful you know, just just there again to help understand how you can put events into context as you see them developing.

Uh, you know, put your observation to be basically go from situational awareness to situational understanding.

And then of course another one is that that social media threat continuum that we use as far as the models for understanding how criminals work, but as far as the protective intelligence uh you know, lead security model for why don't you go ahead on that, Okay?

Yeah.

Basically it's the idea.

Is you just can't have guns with guns, okay, And so you really need to have a good protective intelligence uh program in place to support, you know, and really joined at the hip with your your physical security program there and really your cybersecurity to it.

It's all it all has to be code joined.

But so what you're really doing is assessments.

You're you're looking at baseline threat assessment.

You're looking at uh, you know, assessments of the protect e's public profile on the internet, what's available, what's out there, what's not out there, what should we protect You're you're looking at, you know, obviously taking information in from the detail, you're analyzing it.

You're investigating it's to some point, trying to identify who these people might be.

You're logging sightings that that might be potential surveillance, and you're you're putting all of those things together at databasing it and trying to stay ahead of the thread actors to identify activities that are associated with the attack cycle, activities that are associated with the pathway to violence, with that social media threat continuum.

So you're trying to put those you know, categorize it and understand contextualize what you're seeing and what you're team seeing.

And so by having the protective intelligence function that you have a place where the information that's being collected can be synthesized and turned from information into intelligence that can be actionable that can help you prevent those attacks from happening.

You know, some examples that if Fred and I talk about uh uh you know in the past where where we've had uh you know, counter surveillance operations going uh.

You know, there's been cases where we've we've picked up uh there again just based kind of on demeanor and you know, what they were doing.

But we've picked up.

Like pedophiles or hanging out around schools of uh, you know, the protect these children here.

You know, we we initially we're kind of looking at that you could just be a kidnapper.

Now it's just a pedophile.

But still we're able to get the cops in on them, uh, you know, and and and resolve those things.

But then there's a lot of stuff that's innocuous, but you know, when you follow up on it, then it kind of becomes more understandable.

But still you can rule those things out as potential hostile apps.

Right, So you know we work stuff like, uh, you've had a p I who is working uh a divorce case against the corporate executive hanging out in the parking lot of the building.

Well, that's why they're they are doing surveillance, and it's hostile surveillance.

It's just not an attack surveillance.

Uh.

We've seen the same thing with uh, you know kind of process servers that they want to serve somebody a lawsuit and they're waiting for that person to come out of work so they can approach them because it's a known location, right and and so you know that's where that having that ability to investigate, analyze, and contextualize what the team seeing really then provides a lot.

Of capability there.

And then of course the things like that, you know, the social media monitoring, so looking for those threats, looking for instances of your protectee being mentioned by these extremist UH influencers, being denounced by these extremist influencers, being doxed, being you know, uh called for you know, these these influencers calling for their followers to harass or or or target these people.

Kind of like what what you're talking about with the ICE earlier, about the ICE agents being uh doxed and targeted because of these extremist influencers calling for that kind of activity.

So you're looking for those things as well and really putting that you know, that intelligence bubble or layer around the protective detail.

You know, it can evolve things like surveillance detection, because what happens is detail agents are always focused.

You know, they call them close protection agents for a reason, right because they're close to the principle.

They're looking for those close in threats, the immediate threats.

But they're not going to see the guy across the street that's conducting surveillance.

Their eyes just aren't going to go there.

They're not going to see the car that follows them when they leave the parking lot, because that's not you know, what they're focused on.

And so having those counter surveillance elements in place to record those things, to note those things, to report them and then have them cataloged, analyzed and assessed, it just forms a very strong program and uh, you know, it's just something that allows there again protection teams to be proactive instead.

Of just reacting.

And Carlos Scott you did a fabulous job explaining the model.

You know, to put it in a operational kind of component.

If you think in concept, if you all your listeners can envision this a bruder film with the agents traveling at Daly Plaza.

Well, inside the coat pocket of those agents were called three flash cards, three by five index cards, and on that flashcard was a photograph of a person of interest or a bolo we call them pois today is in our business.

So imagine you're trying to pick out a person in a crowd as you're traveling down the road that might be in an index card in your pocket.

It was almost an impossible task in those days.

So the evolution of this concept is one that even when Scott and I started, when we would have thread actors, we would photograph, We would take a photograph of a thread actor, we would photocopy that, we would physically pass it around to agents on protective details for example, and then we would have those pictures in our coat pockets and we would be out there looking on the perimeter for a thread actor to get inside, looking for a John Hinckley kind of person, or looking for a sur hand sur hand kind of person.

If we had that intelligence that they even existed.

Most of the time, we did not have the intelligence that they even existed, and that was the problem a Dalley plaza.

You know, the Secret Service had no intelligence on Lee Harvey Oswald on what was called the Lancer detail at the time, the JFK detail.

So technology today, if you fast forward to twenty twenty five, can be managed easily.

For example, you know, we both work with a company called Ontic, which manages that threat landscape so you can put it all on a single pane of glass.

And the ability to do that today has really changed the evolution of the business.

So I can look at my smartphone today and know how many threat actors are around any fixed location, any mobile location, and any city I might be.

So managing that kind of data today, with the influx of social media and sentiment analysis, is one of the hardest problems that corporate security people manage today.

And I don't care if you're at a company the world's largest company, or if you're doing a small operation and a business.

You know, trying to manage that threat landscape today is very dynamic and it changes all the time.

So much there unfortunately running out of time, but before I get to the last question, is one of the highlight that's got me in a great point.

This is something I always try to teach my classes that not every criminal is the same.

They have different mos, different motivations, just like you mentioned with the p I compared to a serial rapist, compared to a serial killer, compared to a terrorist.

And you have to know that.

So I'm really really glad you pointed that out.

The book again, is the protective intelligence advantage mitigating the rising threat to protecting people, no prominent people.

I guess my last question and maybe you think Fred's already going that direction.

You said future trends and we have AI.

I watch a show.

It's a British show called Capture.

I don't know if you folks have ever seen it.

It's an interesting show.

A lot of deep fakes going on, trying to get people blamed for murders and things of that nature so they can kind of divert attention.

But what's what's going on in future trends?

AI?

What's the book say?

And your books say.

Well, really, you know, there's a number of areas that it's going to impact, you know right now, you know, and there's different types of AI, right, So in our large language model type AI wrote using a lot of that in the tools we use to scrape social media, you know, and to really kind of monitor things like the license plate reader, cameras and such.

So there's there's really quite a bit of AI that's going on on the good guy side.

Of course, the bad guys use it as well, right, And I always like to like an AI.

Well, it's like any tool.

It can be used for good, it can be used for bad.

But as you know, the protectors, you need to understand how it works and how to use it so that you can counter it.

And so I'm you know, we're we're big.

Fred and I are both big proponents of encouraging security practitioners to learn how to use AI so they can learn to defend against it.

But at the same time, that large language model, that type of AI is also helping it make it easier for for threat actors to gather targeting information, uh, you know, on potential targets as they scrape the internet for that type of information, and so you know that that's kind of the bad side of it.

You know, you mentioned deep fakes briefly.

You know, we are definitely seeing a very rapid evolution of that.

It's gone, you know, just in my clients.

It's gone from just like you know, pornography of my clients, you know, basically putting their faces.

On a porn actor's body.

Two deep fakes that are involved in in you know, like president fraud, business fraud, where they're they're using deep fake voices to try to get money sent.

We even had a I was talking to a client who had a case where they had a zoom call in which the CEO seated in his office, you could see him in his office, told somebody to do a transaction, and it was all bogus.

It was a deep fake of the CEO.

So it's becoming more and more difficult.

Also, I'm very concerned.

We already see a lot of and I actually was just quoted in New York Times last week talking about all these scammers that are setting up accounts in the name of the athletes and other people and then you know, scamming people with those accounts.

Right now, they're just basically dming and they're basically just you know, email chatting with those people.

Imagine though, if they start having video conversations or audio conversations with the voice of the you know, the purported person.

It's going to be very right now, it's difficult to convince them that they weren't convinced that they weren't conversing with the real person.

Once they see it and hear it, it's going to become even more difficult.

And I'm really afraid that it's only a matter of time before we see one of the people who's you know, being impersonated attacked by one of the people who have been scammed, just because they're totally convinced that it was that person and not you know, some due to Nigeria that was scamming them.

So I think that that's only going to uh, you know, make things more more and more difficult coming.

Down the line.

And you know, think about the larger implications at a national level as far as you know, the political scene.

Once you start seeing you know, deep fakes of some politician you know, claiming he was at Epstein's Island with with underage girls or something.

So I think that there's a lot of you know, negative repercussions there.

But I think we're also going to be able to use AI to combat that.

And that's where kind of the You know, the importance is on us as practitioners to really embrace AI and figure out ways to use it defensively.

Yeah, and just to piggyback, we can't stress enough how these deep fakes are going to be a problem for everybody going forward.

I know even in discussions in Washington with some of my government contacts that it's one of the biggest concerns that they have when it comes to just the impersonation of government officials, that it could go viral so quickly it's hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

I watched a demo put together with a company that can very quickly mitigate that threat.

Having said that, what they showed you the ease of operation and how Carlos, you and I are talking to each other, but how do you know you're even talking to Fred, and how easy that can be done.

It's pretty scary.

And I don't think that most of America understands that at dyscope yet unless you've been specifically burned by that.

But it's coming, and it's going to be coming as a wave.

It made me a little bit suspicious of what I'm talking to you or now.

Well, how do you know that you are, Oh boy, let mean we're gonna find fort here.

It is the protective intelligence anddvantage mitigating the rising threat to prominent people.

That could be a whole show in itself.

I guess my last question was I thought was kind of interesting cameo who created as if it was meta or what company was it that's creating these glasses now that you can see people coming in, My mind went into your directions for a second, and I thought, I wonder if law enforcement will eventually have these glasses where you can start picking up people's physiological responses.

Why is this.

Person's heart rate going up all of a sudden when we walked by or the cop walk by, and what's going on?

Why is this person standing in this corner?

Like you mentioned earlier, several reasons why people could be But then you can pick up other things.

Maybe you can pick up the id with the glasses, right, well, this person's got to criminal record, or oh this person's heart rates going up.

I don't know any ideas anything out there that you've seen on that, or we keep it on the down low, as they say.

Well, I think we're already seeing some of that with some of the AI enabled, whether it's the weapon recognition systems or the face recognition systems.

And certainly, you know, countries like China are are big time going into that field and you know, in their quest to really control their their society.

But but certainly I think that there is a very real possibility of having that kind of of AI.

You know, they're again for good or for bad.

But I I could see an application on you know, an agent having Google glasses with facial recognition that could point out pois, hey, this is a thread actor, you know, uh this or or just this is paparazzi, which is probably more common, which is a kind of thread actor, but I mean more common for for my uh my operations where I was dealing with paparazzi.

But yeah, I really do think that that's you know, the type of thing we're going to see going on, uh, you know, as we move forward.

But there again that that's why it's important and incumbent upon security practitioners to understand the technologies and the implications for good and for ill.

Yeah, there's a reason, Carlos that the intelligence community loves reading fiction, especially science fiction and things that are on the horizon because that spins off all kinds of gadgets and ways to manipulate that for either good or bad purposes.

You read my mind as I was thinking about all the again the superhero movies and how many technologies I've seen that they were talking about ten, fifteen, twenty years ago that now it's true.

It's kind of wild thinking wow, And that's where I kind of got the idea with the Google of glasses.

And I think one of the agents of Shield or something was able to do that and be able to measure.

This person's heart rate.

Why is this person's heart rag going up?

They must be concerned about something.

And I thought, you know what, that's not going to be too far off, because they're already doing it now with medical AI as well, being able to determine people's blood, sugars and stuff without.

Even getting contact.

So doesn't su fascinating stuff.

Gentlemen, the book again, The Protective Intelligence Advantage Mitigating the Rising Threat to Prominent People by Fred Burton and Scott Stewart.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hey, thanks for having.

Us, Carlos, Thank you, as always, we greatly appreciate it.

Thank you very much, both of you folks.

You know what to do, share, subscribe, hit the.

Like, Butndon you know we like it, and go get the protective intelligence advantage.

You won't be sorry.

Stay safe out there, everyone,