Based on the openness of this weeks discussion, I wanted to talk about a topic that resonated closely with me recently. As I mentioned before in my introduction, I use to live in Virginia Beach for 6 years where many of my friends still reside (some whom are in Law Enforcement). As most of you know there was recently a shooting at the Virginia Beach Municipal Building. While this is not necessarily related to CI/KR, I believe that significant events like this also have a dramatic effect on the local populations in which they occur (much like a hurricane, wildfire, disaster, etc. would). While this is a stretch, the human factor, which in this case created a massive event throughout Virginia Beach, can also have similar effects if conducted across the CI/KR sector of our government. There were talks this past week about the Hawaii Missile Crisis. What if a more devastating situation were to prevent itself because of the actions of one disgruntled employee, or an insider threat due to terrorist influence? I think we need to invest more time and money into the human element of our CI/KR in regards to mental health and the longevity of our personnel in these fields. There is a lot of interesting material out there relating to topics such as this. One that I have read was an operational guide to preventing targeted school violence, much of which was also derived from the Secret Service (USSS) threat assessment model.

A good place to start is https://www.secretservice.gov/protection/ntac/ and I’m curious to see what some of you think about this, as I didn’t want to go down the typical path of cybersecurity, National disasters or terrorism.