Executive Protection and OPSEC

Executive Protection (EP)

also known as Close Personal Protection or bodyguarding refers to security measures taken to ensure the safety of one individual who may be exposed to elevated personal risk because of their employment, celebrity status, wealth, associations or geographical location.

Protective measures should include 

• Home Security Systems
• Bodyguard Armored Vehicle and Vehicle Scramble Plans
• Mail Screening
• Private Travel
• Background Checks for other employees, and all of this on top of many other precautions. 
• Executive Protection may also provide security for immediate and/or extended family members to prevent Kidnapping and Extortion Protection.

A Protective Security Team Leader is solely responsible for the makeup of PSD Teams, advanced skill sets, body protection, walking drills, medical, communications, driving, control and command of SAP (Security Advance Party) drills, PES (Personal Escort Section) drills, CAT (Counter Assault Team) drills, writing and documenting Standard Operating Procedures, conducting site surveys, route recon's, IED's, vehicle/personnel searching, conducting Operational Orders groups.

Executive protection occasionally becomes an item of general public interest, usually when it fails.

With this said, It is imperitive for the Security Person to understand and praticeOperations Security (OPSEC).

Operations Security,simply put, is a process that identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by adversary intelligence systems, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, and then executes selected measures that eliminate or reduce adversary exploitation of friendly critical information.

The Process:

• Identification of Critical Information: Identifying information needed by an adversary, which focuses the remainder of the OPSEC process on protecting vital information, rather than attempting to protect all classified or sensitive unclassified information.
• Analysis of Threats: the research and analysis of intelligence, counterintelligence, and open source information to identify likely adversaries to a planned operation.
• Analysis of Vulnerabilities: examining each aspect of the planned operation to identify OPSEC indicators that could reveal critical information and then comparing those indicators with the adversary’s intelligence collection capabilities identified in the previous action.
• Assessment of Risk: First, planners analyze the vulnerabilities identified in the previous action and identify possible OPSEC measures for each vulnerability. Second, specific OPSEC measures are selected for execution based upon a risk assessment done by the commander and staff.
• Application of Appropriate OPSEC Measures: The command implements the OPSEC measures selected in the assessment of risk action or, in the case of planned future operations and activities, includes the measures in specific OPSEC plans.