Month: August 2018

Shining a Spotlight on Better Event Security

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Mass shootings like the one that occurred this past weekend at The Jacksonville Landing entertainment complex and last year at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas shake us to our core. They make us feel vulnerable in moments when we should instead feel excited. Large performance spaces have been cultural cornerstones for thousands of years because they uniquely bring together people regardless of race, creed or gender over a shared love for the arts. Attacks like these exploit one of the most powerful uniting forces in our society.

The challenge for security professionals is that these venues take a number of different forms. For example, in the Boston area you could see Moulin Rouge at the Emerson Colonial theatre, the Eagles at TD Garden arena and Cirque du Soleil’s LUZIA under a big top at the grounds of Suffolk Downs – all within the same month. As adversaries shift their focus to public places and become increasingly innovative in their strategies, we need a new approach to venue security.

A New Focus for Attackers

Since adversaries have moved on from hard targets such as airplanes, government facilities and military bases, there has been a significant shift to soft targets such as performing arts centers, sporting venues and arenas. While this is widely known – our CEO tells the story often of the anxious conversations he recently witnessed fellow parents having as he picked up his son’s friends to take them to an Imagine Dragons concert at a stadium – not enough is being done to address this new focus of keeping loved ones safe.

Further, the attack method and the perpetrator have changed. The rise of crowd-sourced terrorism has led to readily accessible means for an attack. Firearms, vehicles and home-made explosives are within reach as adversaries shift their focus from high-profile locations to anywhere people gather.

Raising the Current on New Security Technology

While attackers have focused in on specific venues, security screening technology has been largely unchanged. Today when you go to a see a show at a theatre, you’ll likely wait in line for sometimes 30-45 minutes before approaching a metal detector for which you have to empty your pockets or divest personal items before walking through. Many stadium and arena operators no longer even allow visitors to bring backpacks or other bags into their venues to improve the efficiency of screening.

Advancements in technology are changing this status quo, providing higher throughput and improved threat detection with less disruption. Some combine personnel and bag screening to help minimize removal of personal items and speed up the process. These technologies are using the latest sensors, software and user experience design principles to provide an improved level of security with a better visitor experience.

While technology is an important component to an effective security plan for a performing arts center, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. When building a security plan, facility managers should work to understand their threat vectors, vulnerabilities, and mitigation plans. They should incorporate the following components into a comprehensive security plan.

  • Intelligence: Understand and identify the threats to the area, building, and people in it. Work with various federal, state, and local enforcement agencies and leverage the facility team’s network of contacts. Threats are constantly changing; therefore, intelligence must be ongoing.
  • People and Training: Guards and officers serve as the frontline, they know the facility and the people in it. They should be trained on an ongoing basis in security protocols as well as identifying suspicious behavior.
  • Processes and Protocols: Facility managers can no longer use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to security. They need tailored systems and well thought out processes and protocols – like risk-based security – to ensure security layers are properly deployed throughout a venue.
  • Technology: As mentioned above, new technologies can provide threat prevention beyond the capabilities of guards to significantly improve screening operations. CCTV and access control expand the reach of the team on the ground. Further, facial recognition technology can be employed to recognize and authorize employees in an employee screening application or to adjust screening for VIPs.
  • Visitor Experience: With new technology and processes, it’s important that customer experience is not a secondary consideration – especially at a performing arts center. A security experience can maintain a level of calm and unobtrusiveness.

By employing a holistic approach, security guards and facility managers at performing arts centers can be armed with the information they need to quickly and confidently assure a safe environment for their visitors. With the right technology, they can effectively screen and adjust layers of security in response to changing threat levels without impacting visitors and their normal pace of life. In fact, when selecting new technologies, facility managers should look for solutions that provide a balance between improved security and a better visitor experience.

While related issues like the gun control debate may divide us, cultural experiences like seeing a show or going to a concert unite us. We can all agree that we deserve to feel safe in all the places we gather. At Evolv, we will continue to innovate to bring intelligence and security at the perimeter of soft targets to keep people safe – at performing arts centers and beyond.

Read more here about safeguarding against soft target attacks.

Bulletproof backpacks, #2 pencils and iPads – Preparing for Back-to-School Season in the Era of Active Shooters

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The impending Labor Day celebration not only signifies the end of summer but also the start of the back-to-school season. Whether school buses are already making their daily routes through your neighborhood or you’re still chasing your kids to finish those final pages in their assigned summer reading, there is a dark cloud lingering above the back-to-school season: active shooter prevention and protection.

In past years, those of us who are parents have become accustomed to the run-of-the-mill back-to-school shopping list. However, as we enter the 2018-2019 school year, we are facing purchase decisions we never thought we would have to make. The list we’re armed with doesn’t feel quite as light in our hands.

Bulletproof backpacks, clear backpacks and TuffyPacks. These are now the items that fill back-to-school shopping carts.

The active shooter incidents that targeted schools last year created a ripple effect that was felt around the country. With reports of Parkland still ringing in our ears, school boards, superintendents and principals spent the summer brainstorming and hypothesizing about potential solutions. While parents have been tracking down bulletproof school supplies, teachers have been immersed in active shooter training programs while school districts are spending millions installing bulletproof windows.

Undeniably, this is an issue that needs to be solved particularly as soft targets and large places where individuals gather continue to be targets for attackers. Today, attackers are looking to inflict as much pain and damage as possible with one attack. What’s more, in the U.S. in particular, the access to guns has made it easy for anyone with a grievance to act on it in a way that can affect hundreds of lives.

As school districts, local officials, parents and students rally together to put forth a solution, it’s difficult to get a grasp on where to start or what even qualifies as a good solution. Some schools are already equipped with metal detectors – should others follow suit? Are metal detectors practical for a school environment? What about AI, facial recognition and other innovative technologies? When is it an invasion of privacy?

As the need for solutions to combat active shooters in schools continues to grow, the security industry is responding two-fold on both the consulting side and the technology side. Organizations of all sizes have been motivated to deliver technology that will help make school a safer place. As a result, the number of solutions and innovations available to us seem endless.

Technology can help us do incredible things. It can analyze thousands of data points in seconds. It can help you see things from miles away. It can identify an object as something specific based on pre-programmed characteristics. Leveraging technology – whether it be cameras or sensors – and applying it to physical security, particularly as it relates to schools, can significantly improve the safety of the environment without creating a prison-like atmosphere.

One technology that cannot be ignored when discussing this topic is face recognition. Today many schools require students to carry photo ID badges which allow them to get onto campus and also enter various buildings on school property. The face recognition most schools rely on today is based on staff using their eyes to detect someone or something that’s “just not right”.  This is inconsistent, inherently fallible, and biased.  Automated face recognition technology doesn’t blink – it’s always on, it’s consistent and objective, rather than relying on human memory and attention. Face recognition can be instrumental in helping to enhance a school’s security posture by automatically identifying individuals who shouldn’t be on the premises, or others that pose a potential threat based on input from local law enforcement, teachers or school administration.

Technology however, is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s more than just leveraging the technology available today to solve this problem – it’s about fostering a conversation. While it is promising to see school districts around the country spring into action ahead of the coming school year, there is a need for much closer, tighter coordination between all involved parties.

Only when we take an integrated, holistic approach – that marries technology and the broader discussion – will we find ourselves with a proactive plan to combat this problem. At Evolv, we look forward to continuing to cultivate those partnerships and foster those much-needed conversations as we work to identify a solution to this ever-pressing problem.

Corporate Offices Deserve More Than the Same Old Thing in Security

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In April, Nasim Najafi Aghdam walked onto YouTube Inc.’s Silicon Valley headquarters and shot three employees before killing herself, because she was angry about company policies she felt limited views of her videos. A few days later, Jimmy Lam walked into a United Parcel Service office in San Francisco and killed three and wounded two more before killing himself. In June, Jarrod Ramos killed five staffers of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis over a long-running dispute with the newspaper.

These are just three tragic signs of the growing scourge of mass shootings in corporate offices. While horrific school shootings have understandably dominated the news in recent years, workplace attacks have been more common. According to the FBI, 43 percent of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016 (the most recent data available) occurred in workplaces and other commercial buildings, compared to 22 percent in schools and on campuses.

Given the wide availability of guns and little chance of meaningful gun control, it’s safe to assume the frequency of such tragedies will continue to increase. Yet the tools available to companies that want to take proactive action remain unchanged: invest in metal detectors, and in the security staffers to operate them. While better than nothing, this combination of investments will never deliver the effective, affordable and operationally viable security systems companies deserve. Having been in the weapons detection business for over twenty years, here’s why I say this:

Metal Detectors:  Before I tear it down, I want to give this 90-year-old technology its due. If you want to find a small Saturday night special or box cutter, even a middle-of-the-road metal detector will find it. And metal detectors definitely deliver an effective deterrent. If one would-be killer decides to scrap his plan after seeing the metal detector at the front door of your company, the investment was worth it.

Screening with metal detectors is slow and cumbersome, they don’t provide security designed for the pace of life.

That said, metal detectors on the market today were not designed for the modern corporation. Most remain optimized for detecting small bits of metal, even if it causes long delays as workers queue up to empty their purses, pockets, backpacks and briefcases to be screened. With increasingly mobile, fluid workforces that include a high percentage of contractors and part-time workers, companies cannot afford the level of acuity that is required at an airport or other “hardened” facilities.

We took a very different approach. Along with optimizing for detection, we optimized for throughput and operational efficiency – in other words, a better visitor experience. Systems need to focus on actual threats, not every coin or key—and do so without requiring people to empty their pockets and purses, take off their shoes or remove laptops from their briefcases.

For today’s offices, embracing a risk-based security approach that recognizes the difference between low risk items like pen knives and actual threats, along with deploying high throughput screening systems is necessary to create lasting and effective security.

Screening with metal detectors is labor intensive and the units themselves are uninviting.

Staffing Up: Having more people working at checkpoints doesn’t necessarily make your environment safer, but it will make your company somewhat poorer. Capital cost—the price tag for the metal detection systems—is not the problem. According to the Department of Justice, a middle-of-the-line metal detector will cost around ,500. The problem is that it typically takes at least three people to man each system — one to make sure individuals divested of anything metallic that might create a false alarm, another person to check the bags, and a third person to do secondary searches in the case of an alarm – legitimate or otherwise.

Venues, airports and office buildings need to consider technology that does the heavy lifting with fewer guards required. One that can differentiate between everyday objects and possible threats, where there’s no divestment required. A screening system that is powered by software results in more than an unspecified alarm. Instead, the location of the suspicious object is highlighted to facilitate faster, less guard intensive, and less intrusive alarm resolution.

Screening with metal detectors does not ready you for tomorrow’s threat.

And finally, there’s the question of future-proofing. I believe that any piece of equipment that operates as a stand-alone piece of hardware will have limited utility in the future. As of now, this describes nearly every metal detector on the market. Effective inspection systems today and in the future will need to be software-based, networked and have enough on-board computing power to watch out for a wider array of threats.

Read more here about six ways to prevent soft target attacks.

AI’s Role in the New-World Security Paradigm

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It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is exerting its influence on society in profound ways. AI can be found pretty much everywhere – in applications ranging from self-driving cars to online assistants to game-playing computers to the prediction of judicial decisions. It’s solving problems, moving markets and changing lives.

AI is also weaving its way into the realm of physical security. While its uses are still evolving, AI is positioned to play a key role in the new-world security paradigm, where terrorist attacks and mass shootings have broadened the threat landscape and made it more unpredictable. Security responses are shifting from reactive to proactive, and vendors are integrating AI technologies into some of today’s security solutions. Here are three AI applications that can help organizations take a proactive security approach to prepare for future threats.

Determining what’s “normal”

Before you can declare that a situation is abnormal and worth attention, you need to be able to define “normal.” Using machine learning, an advanced form of AI, computers can be taught how to identify an object once certain characteristics are specified. Once the computer learns what a normal environment is, it can monitor for anomalies and alert security personnel when it identifies something out of the ordinary.

More specifically, computers can be taught what is allowed in a certain area at a certain time. For example, a system can be taught that figures moving around outside a public building are normal during the day but abnormal at night. When an environment changes from normal to abnormal, an alert can be automatically triggered.

Using AI, computers can do more of the work of monitoring environments, giving guards and operations personnel more bandwidth to focus on higher priority tasks, such as quickly responding to an actual threat. Automating monitoring of these environments also reduces human error.

So, now that AI is helping to define what’s “normal,” it can go to work determining what constitutes a “threat.” Machine learning can be taught to identify an object as something specific based on certain characteristics. This is referred to as “object recognition.” It can be used to identify outliers to the norm – which, in a security context, can be defined as threats.

For instance, in the situation above, security personnel want to be alerted at night if a specific type of figure enters the scene. People obviously qualify as potential threats. Perhaps some large animals or vehicles would be worthy of an alert. Small animals? Birds? Windblown trash? These would be picked up by some sensing systems, but they’re not actual threats. If a computer can be taught to recognize certain objects by their size, shape or specific actions, it can flag threats and filter out benign activity.

With the right sensors, when surveying a large crowd of people, guards can determine if a visitor’s bag might contain a threat object and then track that visitor or object. Should that person appear back on the screen without the bag, the computer can search the environment for the item, quickly sending security guards to that specific area and clearing the crowd.

In a security checkpoint scenario, this application drastically reduces the need for hand wanding or physical full-body pat downs as the technology itself can alert guards if someone is carrying an item of interest. Guards can then focus on a subset of people as opposed to screening thousands of visitors or travelers with the same level of rigor – which would improves the visitor experience for all involved.

Tracking a figure based on characteristics is advanced; re-identifying the figure without using facial recognition takes security to a whole new level. This technique, referred to as “object re-identification,” is used to track an individual through multiple fields of view from different cameras. With law enforcement teams often working from blurred and obscured images when identifying a suspect, this emerging capability is extremely promising despite its current limitations.

Being able to track someone or something by its shape, clothing or gait could best be described as a game-changer for security operators. Using AI, law enforcement could, in theory, track a known threat and detain a suspect before he commits an attack. However, performance improvements in faceless detection are still needed as false match rates continue to run high.

AI + IQ

While AI’s adoption is helping organizations and security professionals proactively prepare for future attacks, it can’t do this alone. It has the power to analyze data quickly and identify patterns, but it can’t necessarily determine if these patterns are relevant. AI needs help from the kind of real, grounded intelligence that only humans can provide. Using the combined power of AI and human intelligence, security teams can truly arm themselves to fend off emerging threats.

Read more here about how AI will impact the airport.

The Dangerous Dawn of the DIY Gun Industry

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In the first episode of his new show “Who Is America,” comedian Sacha Baron Cohen did a surreal bit in which he persuaded three U.S. Congressmen and former Senator Trent Lott to support his character’s desire to train children as young as four years old to carry guns to help stop school shootings. “Kinder Guardians,” he called them.

Well, how’s this for surreal? On July 10, five days before the episode aired, it became legal for anyone in most parts of this country — convicted murderers, known terror suspects and, yes, even children — to easily and legally make a gun in their own basement. And not just any gun, mind you. An untraceable gun.

This development is the result of the U.S. State Department’s decision to settle a lawsuit brought by Austin, Texas-based Defense Distributed, which sued the government in 2015 for the right to publish plans to 3D print a handgun, along with other designs including milling instructions to program a desktop 3D CNC machine to create guns and gun parts. Today was the day Defense Distributed had planned to relaunch the company’s online repository of files, which is calls DefCad.

Fortunately, a Federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order yesterday in a case brought by eight states, preventing the distribution of the CAD files, pending the trial. While it turns out Defense Distributed had already started distributing the files, the website relaunch was sure to attract the attention of people who our society has decided should not have access to guns. As the blurb on Defense Distributed’s website (now turned upside down, in protest of the restraining order) proclaimed: “The age of the downloadable gun formally begins.” Rarely has the phrase “dodging a bullet” rung so true.

Defense Distributed’s vision is a big deal. While there’s been a DIY gun movement for years, you needed some expertise in metal-working and a hobbyist’s passion for guns, manufacturing or both. Not anymore. Defense Distributed has made making a real gun at home as easy as buying a home-brew kit to make your first batch of beer. Say you want to build your own AR-15 without the government having any knowledge. There are just four simple steps. First, put down a 50 deposit to get one of Defense Distributed’s Ghost Runner metal milling machines (while the full price isn’t listed on the website, this excellent article in Wired says the machine costs ,200.) Second, buy legally-available gun parts, such as the muzzle and the grip of an AR-15, as well as a slightly-unfinished “lower-receiver” from Defense Distributed or another gun supplies website. (The sale of finished “lowers” for all guns has been regulated until now, as the lower contains the trigger mechanism and therefore is the part that controls whether a gun is single-shot, semi-automatic or automatic). When the “80%” complete lower arrives in the mail, follow the instructions to set it properly in the Ghost Gunner. Fourth, download the file for the part you want to make from Defense Distributed’s website, and then drag and drop the file onto the icon for your Ghost Gunner on your PC. With the push of a button, the machine will complete the milling of the lower, so it can be combined with other AR-15 parts you’ve purchased legally.

Note that the news today is not just about plastic guns. Defense Distributed became well known back in 2013 when it unveiled designs for a handgun called the Liberator that could be printed with a 3D-printer. While a technical milestone of sorts, this and other plastic firearms are only capable of a limited number of shots before they self-destruct. The real threat is the ability to make your own high-quality, fully functional mil-spec semi-automatic weapon.

As an American citizen, I am concerned that the State Department’s decision nullifies the one thing that everyone from the NRA to Parkland student activist Emma Gonzalez could agree on: that people who are known to be dangerous to the public should not be able to get a gun capable of inflicting mass casualties. Suddenly, every Federal measure put in place to make life difficult for mass shooters—the disgruntled teenage boy tired of being bullied at school, the furious ex-husband with a jealous grudge, the radicalized religious zealot—is rendered ineffective. Unless there are state or local laws in place, would-be murderers will not need to submit to background checks, or take the chance that a sharp-eyed gun shop owner will notify authorities of suspicious behavior. They’ll also have an easier time skirting “Red Flag” laws, such as the one passed by Massachusetts on July 3, that gives family members and house-mates the right to request confiscation of guns from people they consider to be dangers to themselves or others.

No doubt, some state and local laws will provide legal checks on Defense Distributed’s “guns-on-tap” vision. On July 30, two days before it planned to relaunch distribution of its CAD files, the company agreed to block access to the site in Pennsylvania to avoid legal action by the state’s Attorney General. It’s also illegal to sell guns and gun parts made with a Ghost Gunner to others without a Federal Firearms License, and in some cases may be illegal to even let someone else use their Ghost Gunner, according to Defense Distributed’s website.

Regardless of what happens with the lawsuit filed by the eight states and the District of Columbia, some checks on Defense Distributed’s “guns-on-tap” vision will remain. The State Department’s decision to allow distribution of the CAD files did not lift Federal prohibitions on the use of DIY milling machines for commercial purposes, without a Federal Firearms License. The machines are supposed to be only for personal use. Defense Distributed warns would-be customers on its website that it may be illegal to even let someone else use your Ghost Gunner in some jurisdictions. Many states and municipalities also have laws regulating use of DIY gun technology–and that will no doubt rise now that the topic has become front-page news.

Contact your elected officials and ask them not to lower the bar.

Read more here about today’s threat vectors and tomorrow’s security threats.