The Ontic Connected Intelligence Podcast

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Till Death Do Us Part — Security at High-Profile Funerals Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

William Villanova knows this all too well, as he has been managing events of this nature for over three decades. He is the President of Frank E. Campbell – The Funeral Chapel in New York City, which has a rich history and is arguably the most well-known funeral home in Manhattan, if not the Nation. He is well known for implementing and promoting the highest standards in funeral service, of which security and privacy are paramount to a successful event.

Key topics of Villanova’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

The preparation and contingency planning that goes into a celebrity funeral in the days/weeks leading up to the event.
The variety of teams involved to orchastrate a high profile funeral – from NYPD to multiple private security teams to Secret Service.
The extent of contingency planning, represented by the collaboration between medical teams and local hospitals on standby.

Empowering Security Professionals to Impact the Bottom Line with HiveWatch CEO Ryan Schonfeld Sep 06, 2023

Show notes

Ryan Schonfeld’s pushback to age-old security processes and refusing to settle for the way it’s always been done has helped him enable security teams to position their department as a business enabler, while protecting people and assets.

Key topics of Schonfeld’s discussion with host Chuck Randolph include:

Why security teams need to understand the needs of the business and how their work can impact the success of the company.
The cultural challenge of security viewing technology as a risk, instead of a force multiplier that enhances the irreplaceable value of human intel.
Trends he's observing in the physical security industry and what’s on the horizon.

Key takeaways:

Ryan Schonfeld: It’s pretty incredible the amount of data that's out there. I think people, by and large, are more aware of the data today than they certainly were back in the early days of social media and smart devices, and as connected homes were becoming more relevant, and just more and more electronics becoming a part of everyday life. But one of the pieces in slow industries, like physical security, is lack of data isn't the issue, and it's really never been the issue. It's how data is effectively collected and operationalized. That's always what slowed things down.

Chuck Randolph: It strikes me, you're talking as much about change management and cultural change as you are operational change. Or, as you said, "Operationalizing the way that we manage the data." I think about it again, we have all these massive bureaucracies, whether it's the military, law enforcement, big corporation, or security provider, you're dealing with a lineage of culture change. You're going to walk in and say, "Hey, we're going to help you manage. We need to look and manage data in different ways." What obstacles have you come up with in your career to change management?

Ryan Schonfeld: I think fear of the unknown's probably the biggest one. As a former cop myself, there's a lot of people in our space that are maybe great security leaders, but don't have deep technology backgrounds. Sometimes, rather than surrounding themselves with domain experts, and people who can help understand the technology, and how that technology can be leveraged to improve the program, that technology starts getting seen as a risk to their job, to their program, to whatever it is that they've been building over time, when in fact it really should be a force multiplier.

I'm not a person that thinks that AI or technology is going to get rid of all the people in security, that's not possible. I think technology has a really important place in our space, but security is always going to require a human to understand context, and understand nuance, and ultimately make a decision that could impact whether or not somebody's life is harmed or protected, or what happens to a brand. That's not something that organizations are going to entrust to AI or a model. But that person who ultimately needs to make the decision needs to be equipped with the best information as quickly as possible, and that's where technology becomes that force multiplier. By embracing that, you have the ability to look great. It's not a risk to your program or to your job.

Chuck Randolph: Ryan, what you're really talking about is making the security function accessible to everybody, right?

Ryan Schonfeld: Yeah. I think as security people, and ex-cops, and ex-feds, and ex-military, we tend to operate in silos, we tend to keep things close to us in terms of what we're doing, and what our programs are, and what's entailed, and we do a very bad job of marketing security to the organization and letting people know what's actually going on.

Because the reality is, as you start marketing your initiatives, security's going to have different visibility within the organization, people are going to find more value, other departments are going to find more value. You might find a bigger budget in terms of cross department budgeting, if you can provide actual tangible value to other departments. As I alluded to earlier too, security leaders are really going to be seen more as thought leaders and business leaders with a seat at the table.

Mitigating the Alarming Extent of Publicly Accessible Personal Data through Global Integrity's Qphone Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Bill Marlow is an internationally recognized authority on Information Security and Risk. As an active participant in critical infrastructure protection on a worldwide basis, he has worked closely with global governments and law enforcement as well as financial institutions, energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies on issues involving cyber terrorism, security plans, and international cooperation. Additionally, Marlow has served his country as a member of the Intelligence Community.

Key topics of Marlow’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

The critical security need behind protecting publicly accessible location data for executives and their corporations, as well as individuals who are deployed abroad.
The technology and strategy that went into creating the Qphone and the importance of the right customer base for this product.
What’s next in the world of privacy and protection.

Key takeaways:

01:19: Bill Marlow: My team and I have been looking at things to help the good guys. The bad guys have the highest end capabilities that you can imagine - spectrum radios, point to point encryption capabilities - the good guys on the other hand are not exactly well funded.

The Qphone is an ultra secure communications app that you can put on virtually any mobile device to allow fully secured, fully protected communications. The critical part is that we collect no data. We don't know where you are. We don't care where you are. We don't know what your phone is. It is truly a clean implementation. The encryption we use is a Quantum resistant encryption using the latest techniques to prevent Quantum computers from actually accessing it.

02:46 Fred: Wow, that's simply amazing. Now I think most of us who have lived in the intelligence space or the protection business are used to apps such as Signal or Whatsapp and so forth. How is Q phone different?

03:04 Bill Marlow: So nothing in life is free as the old adage goes. As you’re using a free app they have to pay for themselves somehow. So what they do is they collect information or metadata on every individual and then correlate that information and sell it lots of places. More importantly, there are a number of agencies around the world from different governments who buy that information through third party companies. They collect things about where you are, what kind of device you have, who you are connected to and how many times you talk to them, so on.

The Qphone, on the other hand, doesn't collect anything. Now, it's not free but we don't collect anything so you're protected from that kind of analysis from going on. To most of us who are in the intelligence business or even the law enforcement business, that's a critical item - not having people be able to tell where you are who you're talking to or what you've done.

13:51 Fred: And I assume ah like most businesses do there's due diligence on customers to make sure that this technology is not falling into enemy's hands so to speak.

14:02 Bill Marlow: Absolutely. In fact, that's one of the critical items for us is that you have to be a recognizable organization. You have to be a corporation. You have to be a law enforcement group.

17:46 Fred: When you think through this having done a lot of threat assessments and vulnerability assessments on ultra high net worth individuals and so forth, you might have a CEO that's very secure but family members and children aren't.

18:01 Bill Marlow: Exactly and they're the vulnerability.

18:04.75 Fred: So in this space with a Qphone if you had this deployed amongst your core family and so forth. You could rest assured that nobody's tracking you monitoring you and triangulating in on your location.

19:23.56 Bill Marlow: I think that more people need to be made aware of all the things that are happening to them in a privacy mode. How much information is being gathered about them people don't realize the extent of the information that is being gathered every time they go out to a news site or they go shopping online or and they don't have the right kinds of protections in place.

19:58 Bill Marlow: Qphone is one piece of a security program. We can protect their communications. We can make sure that they can send documents and messages and they can have conference calls and video calls securely. It works on your your mobile devices. It works on your desktop. But that’s a piece of a much larger program. There’s a need for people to start understanding about the amount of information that's being taken from them.

Clarity Factory Founder Uncovers the Undeniable Correlation Between Diversity and Innovation in the Security Industry Aug 09, 2023

Show notes

Briggs is a leading expert on security and has advised governments and multinational corporations on security, resilience, terrorism, and responses to extremism. She conducts research, thought leadership, and consulting for corporate clients on security and cybersecurity. She is also an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen in 2014 for services to hostage families and kidnap victims overseas.

Briggs and host Dr. Marisa Randazzo discuss:

Why great ideas can change the world and how the Clarity Factory helps identify new insights and drive innovation in the corporate security and cybersecurity industry.
Her process of conveying research to leaders around an organization and the important exercise of always coming back to the core argument.
The undeniable connection between diversity and innovation in the security industry and what gives her hope that change is possible in the near future.

Key Takeaways:

02:50: Rachel Briggs: Any area or profession needs to have good ideas to be able to continually change and improve and face the increasing challenges that we face in the world. But great ideas change the world. (Of course if they are grounded in reality.)

06:31: Rachel Briggs: I think the simpler you can keep your ideas, without dumbing them down of course, the further they can travel and the better able people are able to implement it. That's why it's about clarity for me, it's about taking the messy old world that we all live in today and you know.

06:58: Marisa Randazzo: One of the things that has really impressed me about the work that you have done has been not only the clarity of the ideas but of how you communicate those ideas and especially for a corporate security audience or a c-suite audience.

One of the things that has been so powerful in the work that you have done has been the succinctness and simplicity with which you have conveyed these ideas. It's not just the idea itself. I'd love to just hear about the process of how you go from kind of that raw data to really. Deriving the insights that that you do and then how you communicate it.

08:07: Rachel Briggs: I'm a really big believer in trusting the process. You start by opening the funnel and you know what your initial question is and you keep that really simple and you then open it up and gather as much data and information as you possibly can. At a certain point in time you have to stop and go back down the funnel in the other direction and really get sharp on what the argument is — just try and write what it is. I force myself to get back to one piece of paper and find a way of really describing what it is I think this is telling me in a very succinct way before I start writing.

I think having that discipline really helps you to write and to communicate in a way that is clear. You're always coming back to your core argument and it really helps you to figure out — is this bit of data relevant or not because inevitably you end up with too much and you have to be ruthless.

15:55: Rachel Briggs: You know in anything I write, whether it's a 500 word blog post or a 20,000 word report it has to be focused on what can the reader go and do differently in the office tomorrow.

21:11: Marisa Randazzo: Within security, practitioners are often trying to talk with departments outside of security — whether it is to brief a c-suite on security issues or talk with human resources or an employee assistance program — oftentimes they speak different languages and a researcher within the violence risk assessment field has talked about this great term of boundary spanner. Someone who speaks different kinds of languages in different sectors so you can communicate clearly across different domains.

26:08: Rachel Briggs: I had the pleasure of working with ASIS International and its foundation. I spent about nine months diving into the issue of diversity equity and inclusion within corporate security and - spoiler alert- there isn't as much diversity as there should be. Perhaps we didn't need a piece of research to tell us that but more importantly, what I wanted to do was get under the skin of that and really understand what’s happening.

I interviewed 16 chief security officers and I think without exception all of them got why security and diversity were important. One of the responses that really gave me hope was when we asked for people to tell us from strongly agree to strongly disagree whether they would speak up if they saw something that wasn't right (some discriminatory behavior) and the vast majority of respondents — across all groups men women straight gay disabled non-disabled etc — said they absolutely would speak up.

In other words and I thought that was really important because essentially what we're talking about in terms of diversity is a change management challenge. We're trying to take an industry from being from looking and sounding one way to looking and sounding different in some ways and change happens first because there's the firebrands who are on the frontline who are fighting and shouting and um. You know often feel like they're sort of shouting into an empty room in those early years but answers like that that say people are willing to speak up tells me that things are changing now are they changing fast enough.

The Extinction Rebellion — What It Is and How It Impacts Industries Far Beyond Energy Aug 02, 2023

Show notes

Scott Stewart, Vice President of Intelligence at TorchStone Global, shares his expertise on this topic and how his firm provides advice to corporations on how to best protect themselves and their employees in this environment. While not all activity poses a threat, it’s important for companies to be hyper-aware of activity and the measures activists can take. Before joining TorchStone Global as the Vice President of Intelligence, Stewart led the global analysis of terrorism and security topics at Stratfor and served as a member of Michael Dell’s executive protection team. Stewart also spent ten years as a special agent with the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS).

Key topics of Stewart’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

How the Extinction Rebellion movement evolved over time and why companies outside of the energy industry should be concerned.
Advice for corporations or those managing large-scale events when there is potential for protest activity nearby.
The impact of this type of protest on executive security outside of the office (residential security, banks supporting industries in the spotlight, sporting venues, etc.)

Thor Writes in Real-Time in his Latest Harvath Thriller, Dead Fall Jul 26, 2023

Show notes

Thor is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of now twenty-three thrillers. He has appeared on FOX News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, and many other media outlets to discuss terrorism and current events. Thor was recruited into the Department of Homeland Security’s “Red Cell” program: an elite group of writers and artists commissioned to brainstorm terrorist scenarios for the U.S. government.

Thor returns to the podcast to discuss:

Why Dead Fall is arguably the most intense thriller he has written.
His approach to writing each novel (you’ll learn what the term ‘pantser’ means.)
The top three authors who have inspired him most and the best advice he’s received.

Dead Fall was released on July 25, 2023, and can be found here.

Former Marine Infantry Officer and Entrepreneur Shares Why Strategic Assessments Precede Tactical Mitigation Jul 19, 2023

Show notes

Jack joins host Chuck Randolph to discuss:

How his time in the Marines has influenced his leadership style.
The evolution in training for crisis response in high-risk environments.
How to understand the needs of the customer or protectee and build a strategy around it.
The best ways to add value in a crisis (hint: it’s not a knee-jerk reaction).

Key takeaways:

[12:29] Jack Stradley: The main thing I realized when I was COO of an organization was that security has so many different definitions. I worked with a company that did strictly bomb blast mitigation on buildings and then I had a bunch of EP guys that ran around with surveillance kits who thought about motorcade tactics — and those two people never talked to each other. One of the things the Marine Corps taught me was the “combined arms team.” You know that you don't fight in a silo — you bring your artillery, logistics, and your air power and you all work seamlessly together.

[14:01] Jack Stradley: Today there are tremendously talented people with skills who apply those skills to do security or protection or analysis. Is really kind of easy. It's bringing all the pieces together and then showing value — making people understand the value because security for security's sake is not necessarily valuable. Security is when you can quantify or articulate its value.

[14:50] Jack Stradley: It’s important to remember the risk and the reward for what you're doing and there are no perfect solutions. You know you can't live inside Fort Knox and never leave. That's not a realistic approach so there are always trade-offs. There's always a risk tolerance that has to be understood. That's the ongoing struggle because risk tolerance for each one of us is different.

[24:35] Chuck: You're involved when many things go south for organizations. How do you help organizations or what's your recommendation for maintaining a presence of mind?

[25:23] Jack Stradley: I think that most people react in a crisis and that's the last thing you want to do. You want to take a beat — now that beat can be a microsecond but you take a beat and you evaluate. You look, you listen, you think, then you act — act deliberately, don't react.

Before you have to commit to a course of action and you should take as long as you have but no longer to evaluate things and then make a conscious decision and then continue to evaluate because if it's not working it's maybe time to change course.

[31:10] Jack Stradley: We are inundated with information and that's not a revelation to anyone out there. The hard part is to just you know, be able to see through the noise in the chatter and try and get to the fundamentals in the foundation. Understand — what does this mean to me and how does this affect me and my plans? That's part of what we try to do for people is help them with that.

How Intuit’s Corporate Security Team Demonstrates Value Through Human Connection and Mentorship Jul 12, 2023

Show notes

Alana Forrest started her 29-year public service career in 1983 at the Palo Alto Police Department and rose through the ranks to Lieutenant. Forrest was promoted to the position of Captain by joining the Los Gatos/Monte Sereno Police Department in 2000 and retired in 2012. She has spent the last 11 years in corporate security and currently leads Global Safety and Security at Intuit. She is a proud co-founder of the California Women Leaders in Law Enforcement Symposium, which began as a local partnership in 2006 and is now endorsed by multiple law enforcement associations with a national following.

Forrest joins host Dr. Marisa Randazzo to discuss:

The impact of mentoring on her career and the motivation behind starting the Women Leaders in Law Enforcement Foundation.
The role of storytelling and connecting on a personal level to demonstrate security’s value to other areas of an organization.
Advice for women/girls pursuing a career in protection.

Key takeaways:

[08:38] Marisa Randazzo: I just think it's so important — the value of mentorship. But it's often difficult to figure out how to get started, so the details that you're sharing here are very helpful. I want to ask a follow-up question about the California Women Leaders in Law Enforcement Symposium. Who is it open to?

[09:14] Alana: It's open to anyone. It's not just women but anyone in active law enforcement and retirees can also attend. We're trying to just open up the floodgates and allow anybody who wants to come to join us in California every year. It's been one of the proudest accomplishments in my career — to establish this and have it still be so successful.

[15:53] Marisa Randazzo: It sounds like what your foundation now your symposium did was give people up a place for that colleagueship, especially from those smaller departments when they didn't have it in-house necessarily but they could still access. That same level of connection and advice and commiseration just from outside their department but still within the industry. That's phenomenal.

[16:16] Alana: Yeah, absolutely and even now unfortunately in the 2000s and here we are in 2023 — we still hear similar stories of challenges that we heard in the 1980s and 90s. So it really does provide an opportunity and a forum for people who are really struggling to get some much needed support. It's kind of sad that we are still having some of these conversations. But at least there's support there.

[17:53] Alana: One of the things that I've really tried to do when I first enter any organization is build those relationships and find the right people to talk to — who's in charge of what but also who are the team players that have leadership qualities that you can tell are the people that get things done or has the leadership's ear. Seek out those people to get by your side and have lunch or coffee and have a discussion — what are your pain points with global safety and security or at the security team?

[20:51] Alana: I've been in where data really drives the conversation and so I think any sort of data points or storytelling [help in displaying value]. Tell the stories to let people know exactly what's going On. As people started to come back to work I would take people through our Global Security Operations Center and let them see what we do because people really don't have ah an understanding of how much work we do to keep them safe behind the scenes. So when they walk into that room and they see all the monitors and they see all the people and all the activity and I explain what we're doing and how we keep them safe, that is a huge win.

[33:36] Alana: You know one of the things I'll emphasize is again — finding those mentors and those champions and building relationships is so important. I didn't get to any promotion or any position in my private sector career without the benefit of a relationship or a connection that I cultivated. And also just being willing to be helpful to anyone who reaches out for questions.

Identifying Threat Vectors in Anti-Semitic Crimes with Former Israel Defense Forces Combat Soldier Jul 05, 2023

Show notes

Greg joins host Fred Burton to discuss:

Why the importance of human intelligence prevails all in a technology-dominant business culture.
Trends in anti-semitic crimes that Battle Tested Solutions helps address and how Greg separates true threats from the noise of activity in the space.
Being prepared for the unexpected events that happen when protecting principals abroad.
His biggest lessons learned from his time in the Israel Defense Forces.

Inside the Mind of the Attacker: Using Red Teaming to Mitigate Business Risk Jun 28, 2023

Show notes

Dr. Wheat joins host Chuck Randolph to discuss:

The game-changing role of red teaming in organizations and how, through alternate analysis and critical thinking, to think from the perspective of the attacker.
How diverse thinking results in better decisions and aids in the elimination of biases.
Where analysts can start when implementing a red teaming strategy.
The role of red teaming in helping security teams partner with business leaders to help their organizations thrive.

Key takeaways from the episode:

[03:04] Treston Wheat: Critical thinking is fundamental to the ability to check assumptions the ability to be objective and separate the person from the analysis. The willingness to question dominant ideas (is a key element to red teaming). So everything that made me a really bad academic actually made me a really good red teamer.

[03:44] Treston Wheat: We do something we call poison circles where we basically just come up with ways to attack people. Which sounds a little dark but is very very useful. Because then we have to think through the threat actors and what's their motivation and if they're motivated by — what kind of TTP do they use? How would they behave in a violent situation? How would they behave if they're trying to steal intellectual property?

[06:05] Treston Wheat: My job is doing the research on how a left-wing terrorist would behave differently than a right-wing terrorist because most people when they look at terrorism, they say terrorism is terrorism. They actually all have very different targeting patterns.

[08:32] Chuck: If you're you're working on an objective and you want to understand what is the potential threat actors' activity or actions … How do you start this process? Where does critical thinking start? Walk me through your protocol.

[09:01] Treston Wheat: So the way I start with a threat actor...You go to what they actually say about themselves, because too often in analysis we don't really believe what people tell us even though they're telling us the truth.

[12:56] Treston Wheat: And that's why you need people to come in. It's why diversity of thought is so important for a red team. You need people who actually see the world differently than you do rather than all of us coming from the military or all of us coming from Academia — breaking up groupthink. One of the most important parts of red teaming and acknowledging the bias and heuristics.

[15:14] Chuck: We could be talking about a business function. We could be talking about terrorism. We could be talking about an event — multiple things — to say look I just need someone to give me an alternative thought on this because, at the end of the day, we want to enable business decision makers with options or courses of action that have some facts around them so they can make a decision.

[15:38] Treston Wheat: Which is the entire point of Intel analysis and red teaming is to help our business leaders in particular because we do this for the private sector to make better decisions so that their business thrives.

[21:28] Chuck: You know people are listening right now and thinking this is fascinating I need to use this more in my organization I'm a leader — I'm a team leader, or I'm an analyst where do I start?

[21:48] Treston Wheat: So I think there are two key ways for people to start who don't do analysis regularly and for an analyst I would say something a little bit different. But if you're not used to doing this number one start applying it to your own life. So anytime you make a decision, walk through your process — the entire process. I recommend writing it down because I just think it's always helpful. What is my assumption in this decision? Why did I perceive what this person said or the information I took in that way?

Number two I believe in the use of fiction — reading novels and watching movies and then analyzing them because it gives you an entire plot wrapped up. It's a very useful technique to read novels and watch movies and then analyze them. You don't just passively consume them.

Want to hear more? Listen to the full episode here.

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