TrapWire Surveillance Assessments

Surveillance Assessments

Deployments of TrapWire systems to critical infrastructure sites are often preceded by a comprehensive site assessment conducted by experts in surveillance, surveillance detection and attack techniques. The purpose of this assessment is not to critique current security measures, but to better sensitize security personnel to the methods that terrorist and criminal surveillants will use against their site. In our experience, this ability to see your own site through the eyes of a hostile surveillant is critical to your ability to prevent hostile acts. At the client’s discretion, a written report or oral briefing can be prepared for senior management or other key personnel.

Camera Coverage Assessments

The CCTV Camera Coverage Assessment (CCA) is designed to identify and present the optimal camera positioning around each location for the purpose of detecting pre-attack surveillance and hostile intelligence collection activities. Leveraging the results of the Surveillance Assessment, the CCA will detail the location and required fields of view for each camera to ensure coverage of all surveillance vulnerabilities, choke points, and ingress/egress routes affecting the key surveillance objectives at the site. The CCA will result in a presentation of a plan to optimize the resources required to provide complete video coverage of each site, and to facilitate quick and efficient response by security personnel operating the video management system. The ultimate intent of a CCA is to optimize site camera coverage at the lowest possible cost while providing a much-improved ability to obtain video evidence of surveillance and other suspicious activity occurring around each site.

Who Defines a Hard Target?

This article was written by TrapWire Director Michael Maness, who spent two decades as a senior operations officer and field manager with the Central Intelligence Agency and was involved in counterterror investigations ranging from Pan Am 103 through 9/11.

Understanding the motivation and rationale for a criminal event – be it a school shooting, an armed robbery, or a terrorist attack – is as much art as it is science. It is easy to dismiss every school shooting as a violent cry for help by a mentally unstable individual, every robbery as an act of greed, and every Middle East terror event as being “jihadist” inspired. There are, of course, numerous examples to fit these paradigms; however, this simplistic rationalization risks missing the forest for the trees. It can also lead someone to believe they have a thorough understanding of their adversary – which is always a dangerous assumption to make.