Understanding Personnel Security Measures

Welcome back, everybody. We're on to week four, second of our online weeks, and we're going to be talking about personnel security this week. First off, thank you very much for everybody participating in the physical security walkthroughs. That was really a really quick taste of physical security. I teach a semester-long class in the intro side of it, and frankly, I worked in it for a very long time, and it took me the better part of 10 years to really get good at it. Because there are so many devices and combinations and things that you have to consider when you put in a physical security system, when you use devices, be they electronic or otherwise. But I'm glad you guys got a little taste of it, got to go out and see some of the things on campus that could be considered physical security. And there were some unique things that you brought to my attention. One thing that we didn't talk about this week, but I still want to keep on our radar, is I asked you in your homework to do one thing extra. last week, and that was to write down two or three things that you see that could improve the private security industry's reputation. We kind of determined in our very first session, we went right to the bad side, right? People don't think very much of private security sometimes, and the police who we rely on, and I think who rely on private security more than they like to say, don't really have a trust with private security. And I asked you to write down some things that private security could do or Conversely, if you are a cybersecurity person and you wanted to go that direction, some things that you could do right now as a cybersecurity manager, which is what all of you hopefully will aspire to be if that is your chosen profession. And to write down some things that you could do now that would keep you from falling into that pitfall because something else is coming down the pike. We all know that, right? Things don't change. The guy who was the farrier who put the shoes on the horses always thought that. he was going to be in demand because everybody needed horses to get around. And then all of a sudden he was replaced by the tire guy, right? And then the tire guy was replaced by these major tire shops that do this in bulk and places like Walmart that set up shops that will sell tires all day long, fairly cheap, at least by the standards of automotive repair. And something else will come along. The tires on the cars will eventually be made of something different. Or, as we all probably know, at some point, they won't have tires at all. They'll be hovercraft. Or we will switch to mass transportation of some kind, and that tire guy is going to be out of business. And there are certain things that you could probably do now to keep yourself relevant as a profession and to keep yourself relevant in terms of reputation as a profession. I still want you to have those things. I want you to think about those. We're going to go back as we go through the semester and look at the different things that private security does. I want you to keep that initial list, and I'll ask you to go in and add other things to the list as we go through our various weeks. So I didn't forget about that. And after the end of next week, when we do informational security, which is not cybersecurity, we will go back and revisit that list. So what we're doing now is we're moving through the security triad, physical security being one leg, the next one being personnel security is what we're going to talk about today. And then next week, we will get to informational security, which is more so information in hard form on paper, information that is delivered from one person to another in a non-electronic means, some social engineering, things like that. And then we'll talk a little bit about convergence. how private security, the type that I'm teaching, will eventually converge with cybersecurity to form an integrated and converged security model. But first, we'll start with personnel security. And the definition we're going to use is simply the protection of people. Now, we could say that physical security was kind of that too, right? The devices are used. But in this case, we're not using devices. We're using programs. Some examples of personnel security would be executive protection. Using bodyguards to guard people whose presence is necessary for either cultural reasons, social reasons, government reasons, or commerce reasons. Background checks, which we're going to do a discussion this week on background checks. And although I want you to put some elements of what we talk about in here and show what you know, I'm going to be asking for your opinion on certain things about background checks. And I think it's pretty important for you to kind of... Get that in your mind as you start to think about going into that first professional job. And then private investigations, the types of things that people contract for with private investigators, both companies and individuals, for the protection of themselves from other people. And generally, when we talk about personnel security, you'll find that the other people we're protecting ourselves from are people who are very close to us, especially in the workplace. So one of the first basic questions, since we've already looked at physical security and, you know, the lockdown kind of scenario is, you know, how do we apply physical versus personnel? And the answer is we don't. We apply them both, plus informational in many ways, in a really concerted way. And if you think about that layered protection that we had in physical security, we were really talking about the different physical layers, you know, locks and then maybe. card readers, and then maybe a keypad, and then maybe something different. So we had these good layers of security before somebody got to our protected asset. In this case, we're going to actually layer different types of security in the security triad. So we'll have some physical things, we'll have some personnel things, and we'll have some informational things, perhaps, kind of like the rings of an onion, just in a different way. But sometimes one leg matches a little better than another. If you are protecting diamonds, you're... probably going to have a very heavy physical security presence. If you're protecting information, people's personal information, you may have a very heavy informational security presence. And if you're protecting people from people, right, from the things, the other bad things that people might do to them, you'd be a little heavy on the personnel side. But don't think about, okay, I have this security problem, which one am I going to use? You're going to use all of them in a concerted way. So let's put that into practice. So you're the security manager for an auto assembly plant. I don't know if any of you have ever been in an auto assembly plant, but they're very cool places, very structured. Everybody has a job to do. Every piece of equipment has a place in the line. Henry Ford really, when he set up his assembly line model, really set the stage for this really structured way to put cars together. And in your factory, you're going to put a certain truck model together. pickup truck model together from components, and then they're going to paint the body. That's what your factory does. You get components from places, you put the trucks together, and then you paint the body. Then you ship it off to someplace else for testing, quality testing and storage and distribution. So you have 1,500 catalytic converters on hand. You need that many because you're making, say, 100 cars a day, and you want a two-week supply plus a little bit of an extra. of catalytic converters so that you can put them on the trucks as they come down the assembly line. And I don't know if you know anything about catalytic converters. They're used to convert some of the exhaust to pull the extra fuel back out of it. Again, I guess is the simplest way to describe it. And if somebody is an auto mechanic, I'll stand corrected and you can give me another way to describe that. But each one of those catalytic converters contains seven grams of platinum, seven grams of palladium, excuse me, and two grams of rhodium. So they have these precious metals because that's used as part of the chemical reaction to convert some of the exhaust back to usable fuel. So the recent spot price of platinum was $32 a gram, and rhodium was $160 a gram. So essentially, if you've got seven platinum at $32, you've got $210 plus, you've got $224 worth of platinum. And at $160 a gram, you've got two grams of rhodium, you've got another $320. In rhodium, you've got about $500 worth of precious metals in that catalytic converter. So you have 1,500 of them on site. You've got a fairly robust amount of money there. Now, the paint coating that you're using when you paint these trucks that you're going to do, it's highly destructive to the environment if you release more than 20 gallons into the ground or groundwater. So you can't really have a spill. And you have 10,000 gallons of that on hand because, remember, you're making... 1,400 cars or trucks, rather, in a two-week period, you can't be going buying this stuff by the court. You have to have a lot of it on hand. So if you've got a problem, if 20 gallons gets released and you've got 10,000 gallons on hand, you have some environmental concerns there, and it is a security concern as well. So how would you apply the triad to this? So you've got these materials, and you know that you've got a problem with one for theft. The catalytic converters and specifically the precious metals inside of them, which is not that hard to remove. People have catalytic converters stolen all the time from their cars in cities simply for the precious metals. And then you have another one that is a problem of carelessness. If someone was careless and released that painting coating into the ground, you would have a major environmental issue, which would cause you great reputational harm. great harm to the environment, and certainly a reportable incident to the Environmental Protection Agency. All of those things are very bad. So for the theft issue, you might want to go with more physical security, right? You might want to lock the catalytic converters up. You wouldn't want 1,500 of them sitting on the shelf next to the tires and the other. engine parts that you've got that are worth a little less, the more expensive engine parts, and particularly those that have precious metals that can be fairly easily sold, you'd want to lock those up separately. So if nothing else, you may want to put them in a locked room, right? With access control and only certain people can have access and maybe cameras inside the room to see how many people take out and have them sign out, right? A process to do that. With the paint coating, if someone got careless, they may cause that release. You'd want training, right, from the safety side, and you'd want to have safety protections in. But from the security side, you'd want to lean on personnel security. You would want to potentially have drug screening. I mean, regardless of how you feel about drug use, recreational or otherwise, when people are high or drunk, they are less capable of doing tasks that require some level of skill. I mean, that is a given. It's why we... in law enforcement rely on the whole, you know, field sobriety test. You can't walk the straight line if you're drunk. You can't say the alphabet backwards, although I'm not so sure I could say the alphabet backwards, stone cold sober. But nonetheless, you might want to use drug screening. So in this particular case, you've got two things going on in the same place. And one, you're going to rely on physical protections. And the other, you're going to rely on drug screening. Now, when we go back to those catalytic converters sitting in that locked room, Would you not want to know that the people that you are letting in there, those who do have access to go get them who work in the factory, have not been arrested for the sale of stolen precious metals in the past? So you may also want to have the physical protections of the locked room with card readers and cameras and whatever other devices you see fit, but also make sure that there's a background check on those people to make sure they don't have a history of doing exactly what you hope they're not going to do by putting in those physical protections. So what it really boiled down to was we looked at those threats, the threat of theft and the threat of an environmental issue, a safety issue in this case. But both of them required some security component to help mitigate those. So when we look at the different threats, they don't always fall so neatly into lists as I have them here. But you will find that you will generally use more physical security devices to combat theft and compromise of a resource. against vandalism, and acts against resources other than people. If you're protecting a thing, generally speaking, you're going to use more physical protections. Now, when you talk about violence against employees, customers, and visitors, fraud, harassment, threats, and kidnapping, and kidnapping is a big thing, and I think we'll talk a little bit before we're done here about express kidnapping. You may find that interesting. You're going to use a lot of personnel security. You're going to use a lot of... things like checks, background checks, and credit checks, and employment histories, and education checks, and those kinds of things to make sure people are who they say they are. Before we go too much farther, I wanted to kind of strike that last point home, knowing who someone is. I did a case probably, oh, it's been a good 10 years now anyway. And the reason that it sticks out in my mind is not simply because of how how stupid we were in allowing this to happen. But because I got to work it with a really great friend of mine who we didn't get to work a lot of casework together. We both were doing investigations around different parts of the globe and our paths didn't cross very often. And in this particular case, they did. And so we got a call about a potential theft. What had happened? We had a person that we hired as a contract employee. in a financial center in Memphis, Tennessee, and she was going to be the SAP guru. I don't know how many of you are familiar with SAP, but SAP is a program that really in industry, and I'm sure that some of you used it for other things, but it really follows everything from cradle to grave. You use SAP to order your materials. You use SAP to plan your production. You use SAP to monitor the stages of your production. Then SAP keeps your inventory. SAP helps you with distribution. Basically, it follows every component through as they're combined to make a product and out the door, and then takes care of even charging your customers for it and bringing it back in. You pay for your raw materials. It follows the raw materials through the entire process as far as its financials and where it is in the process, and then sees it go out the door. It's able to help you control your spend in every part of a process in manufacturing. It's used for other things, but that's generally how we used it in manufacturing. In this particular case… The financial center was used to pay suppliers. When someone did something for us. we have to pay them, right? So they supplied us with widgets and we needed a lot of widgets. We bought widgets and then we proved that the widgets were used in production and they were of good quality and they were tested, gets to the payment part. And then the SAP person in the financial center would approve the payment and code in the checks. And the check then would be, essentially, there were some printed checks and others were electronic transfer, which is more and more common, although in many countries you can't do electronic transfer, so you must do checks. So the combination of both. They hired this person as a contractor, and they paid him a salary of $125,000 a year, which was a bargain for someone who really knew SAP. What they found was she had gone in and changed the coding on the checks and the electronic transfers. Instead of going to the bank accounts of our suppliers, they were going to a bank account that she set up. And she did this for a week. And she was a little bit, she didn't quite know how many controls we had in place. She probably could have hit us for a lot more, but she got us for $100,000 in that week. Now, when we started the investigation, one of the first things we asked was her Internet history, right, to see who maybe she was, what she was looking for. We asked for her email and any type of messaging that was on her company computer that we could get to, see if she was talking to somebody else in the company that was helping her. And the very first thing that she looked up, she got her Internet account. And she signed onto her email and set that up. And then she went on the internet and typed in, what is SAP? Not a very highly trained person, yet we hired her. And when we did walk her out, when she was actually fired, right, we found a book with names and social security numbers she had used to be hired as the SAP guru, or not the SAP guru, but the billing guru in other places. She'd never used SAP before, but she'd ripped people off in this billing scheme before. So why not? So the importance of this background check, just, you know, you can't overemphasize the fact that you need to know who's who in the zoo. So that's just one of the basic personnel security tools, right? Background checks and searches. We have testing for alcohol, drugs, or illegal substances. Not necessary everywhere, right? I mean, would I test somebody for, you know, drug use if I was going to put them to work, I don't know, doing landscaping? If they were going to use... a power equipment. Maybe I could say you're not using drugs while you're on the job. I don't know if I would go through doing a drug test on that person. Is it necessary, right? Maybe that's not the best example, but if the person was going to work in a pharmacy, yeah, they're going to need to do a drug test because we're not going to put the kid in the candy store, right? So testing for alcohol, drugs, and illegal substances. Risk assessments related to executive threats. Executives get threatened all the time. We all know not too long ago, The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered on the street in New York, coming out of one hotel, going to another for a meeting. And in this particular case, it wasn't very sophisticated of a scheme. It was just somebody who wanted him dead because they didn't like UnitedHealthcare turning down claims, and they just went ahead and acted as a lone wolf. But for the most part, you get threats to executives, and you do a risk assessment on those threats. They come in all the time. I can tell you that the company I worked for and other companies that we worked with, by comparison, it's not unusual for a Fortune 500 company to get two or three a week letters saying, you know, I'm going to kill this person or that person because of this or because of that. It's very common. And then, of course, risk assessments related to specific organizational functions. So, again, you know, is X. Meaning Twitter, right? More vulnerable today than it was six months ago? I would say watching the news, there are a number of people who don't like Elon Musk today. He's very outspoken politically. And some people love him and some people don't love him. And I'm sure he gets a lot more threats. His specific organizational function, being one of social media, and one that makes people mad to start with in many cases, you need to do a special risk assessment to that. If you worked in an abortion clinic, if you worked in a, gosh, there's any number of industries that people don't really get. Healthcare, right? Healthcare insurance. UnitedHealthcare probably should have been doing better risk assessments because of the type of organization they were. Nobody really loves their health insurance company. Some are better than others, but I can't say that anybody really just jumps up and down since they love their health insurance company or their car insurance company or their mortgage company. or the servicer of their student loan, or as we know from our own experiment in class, no one really loves their cell phone carrier. Those types of organizations know they're not loved. They should be doing better risk assessments. Those are the types of personnel security tools that make a company more successful in thwarting threats from a security perspective. So what should we be looking for and what can we look for in a background check? And we have to stress what we can look for because there are many things we can't look for. So criminal records obviously are part of the equation. But we can look for felonies and misdemeanors, but only convictions. If you are arrested for murder and you were tried for murder and you were found not guilty, you do not have a murder conviction. You do not have a criminal record for murder. Now, there may be a court record somewhere that shows that you went on trial, but that is not going to be released in a background check. Convictions only. Only if you were convicted of the crime. And only if that crime is related to the position for which you have applied. So I usually use this example. If you are going to work at Amazon and you are going to pick products off the shelves, right? Although they do this through an automated fashion, obviously, it would make Amazon successful. But there is some hand pick and pack going on. Right. Machines shut down or specialty items. There are some items that the machines aren't going to just pick off the thing and put in a box for you. You have to go and get them. Right. And if you're going to do that and then you're going to seal boxes and you're going to stack boxes and you're never going to drive an Amazon truck convictions for drunk driving unless they show some sort of pattern that would make you less successful on the job. So, for instance, in the state of Michigan where I'm a resident right now, three drunk driving convictions, you are a felon. If someone had three drunk driving convictions, I may be able to make the case that that felony conviction that they have shows a pattern of behavior of not following rules. And therefore, I think that they are not acceptable candidate for a job. I may be fought in court by that applicant, but I could probably make that case. But in general, if the job does not require. Anything that's close to what the crime was, it is very hard for you to turn that person down. Even in the case, and this has been tried in the courts and it's very tricky, in the case of someone who has a crime against a child, if there are no children in the workplace, it is very hard to say that they are not qualified for the job. Someone who has a conviction for domestic violence, they beat their husband or their wife. If their husband or their wife does not work in that particular facility where you're going to have them work, it may be hard for you to keep them out. The only way you can come back and say that they have exhibited violent tendencies that put your other employees at risk. But it is very hard. You have to make a judgment decision on that. But just understand, it's very important to understand that it must be a conviction and it must have some relationship to the job being sought. You can look at civil records, and specifically you're looking for excessive litigation against former employers. You're going to hire somebody, and if they've sued the last 20 places they've worked, right, for discrimination, for unsafe work, for wrongful discharge, for any number of things. But every place they've worked, they've sued. You want to know that, and the civil records will show you that. But you're looking for excessive litigation. Residential history. They always ask you, where have you lived the last seven years, right? And in many cases, what you're looking for is you're asking them, where have you lived? Well, your background check is going to tell you where they lived. And if the person said, well, I lived in Pennsylvania, and then I lived in Michigan for a while, and then I lived in Ohio, and that's it. You know, I'm only 25 years old. And you run that background check and found out that they lived for six months to a year in New York and didn't report that. It may mean that you want to go back when you do your criminal history, because criminal histories are done state by state. There is no 50-state criminal history check. A company that says they're going to do a national check for you is actually doing 50 individual state checks. They've got it automated, but you have to go to each individual one for a search, and they're all a little different the way they go about doing the releases. You may want to find out if there was anything going on in New York. The company that does your background check for you and almost always contracted out companies to do this. may skip New York if the person didn't report New York. So you want to do a residential history before you do the criminal so you know where they've been. You want to look at employment history, obviously, right? And the only thing you're going to be able to get from that is the start-stop date, the position, and the salary. When you put down that you worked somewhere in the past, it is very rare, and I will say it is the very bad employer. Someone who really doesn't know what's going to hurt them that gives anything more than the day you started, the day you stopped, the position you held, and the salary when you left. That is all that they will release. When you put down that I worked at Burger King and now I'm putting in for a job at McDonald's. When McDonald's calls Burger King, they will say, yep, he worked here from September 1st until October 15th of 2023. He was a fry cook and his final salary was $13 an hour. And if the person says, what kind of employee was he? The smart person at Burger King says, he worked here from these dates. This was his position and this was his salary. It just repeats that part. And many companies have contracted that out now just so that happens, so that's all people tell you. Because you can defame someone very easily by giving a job reference when they're only looking for an employment history and that's all they have the permission to get. If someone wants a job reference, you will need to get something in writing from them saying it's okay to release that information. Somebody puts you down as a reference. You get a note. When he puts me down as a reference, and several students have done that in the past, puts me down as a reference for a job, I get a note saying so-and-so has asked us to use you as a reference. What can you tell us about them? I always say, can I please get a signed release from that person? And companies have those. You sign the application and they will provide that to a reference. You always want to do that because you don't want to say anything good or bad about anybody. Unless you're sure they know you're going to say it. Or at least go and check with that person and say, did you use me as a reference because I'm going to give one? You okay with that? Okay, great. Educational records and certifications, just to make sure that they're compliant with the needs of the role. If the job requires a certificate of completion of a job of a school in radiology to work in a hospital in a radiology department, you want to make sure the person is a... radiologist, right? Doesn't mean that, you know, if they put the job up as, you know, we're looking for a computer operator, a bachelor's degree required. Doesn't mean they can't hire you without the bachelor's degree, but you're looking for an educational record and certifications that make sure the person is legally able to provide the services you're going to contract for. Same with military records. You're looking for skills claimed, the dates of service, and the discharge status. Any of those can be used, the dates of service, basically to make sure there's no holes in their service dates for different jobs. If they claim they have certain skills that they gained in the military, the military discharge will say what schools they've gone to and what specialty they had. You're hiring someone to go work on an aircraft and they just got out of the Air Force. You say, oh, okay, well, they just got out of the Air Force. I'm going to hire them to work on passenger aircraft for Delta Airlines. It would be really bad if you found out that they were indeed a mess cook. And they were making eggs rather than fixing airplanes. So those skills claimed on military records are used. The discharge status, obviously, if they have a dishonorable discharge, that is only given to someone who has been convicted of a crime. So you want to be able to match that up because the state checks for those criminal records will not show that. The military service record would show that. So it's really just another check of convictions. And then personal references. If they've been asked for, if permission has been given by the person who is applying for the job to use personal references, then you could gain new information by talking with personal references that might open up other questions about those things above there. But that's what you use in a background check. Kind of important to understand those things, and especially with you guys who are going out to find jobs now. You know, look, it's convictions. It's relatable to the job, those types of things. It's not as... If you have an indiscretion in your past, it is not as bad as you think normally when it comes to background checks for jobs, unless you're conviction. If you've not spent time in prison, you're probably going to be OK applying for jobs. So why do we test for alcohol, drugs and illegal substances? Obviously, the safety side. Right. But also there is evidence, true statistical evidence, to show that there is an increased. time for people who use drugs and alcohol even outside the workplace. There's decreased efficiency because of that increased sick time, right? If you've got five people working a job and only three of them show up, it's not going to be as efficient as if you had five. There's an increased number of workplace accidents. And as we talked about with our paint example, right, the regulatory oversight comes if you have too many accidents, you've got OSHA and others breathing down your neck and sending people in to inspect you all the time, decreases efficiency. There are increased workers' compensation claims, which increases the cost for the company. And every one of these things, right? People missing work. workplace accidents, workers' comp claims and people not being at work because they're out on comp, all of that decreases morale among your coworkers and your other workers. And so you are indeed allowed to test for alcohol, drugs, and illegal substances. I would just say that not all companies do it. Less and less companies are doing it now. And they are going to a model where unless we see that the behavior of the person is being impacted and we believe it might be because of illegal drugs or substances, alcohol, whatever, then we're not going to really dig too deep in that. If they see that you have increased sick time and believe it's because of alcohol and drugs, they just reserve the right to send you for a drug test then rather than to then make you ineligible right out of the chute. So this week, and there's still a little bit more to go here, guys, so bear with me. But this week in your discussion, we're going to see how you feel about the ongoing verification debate. And Realistically, once you have a background check and you get the job, should there be a new background check every once in a while to make sure that nothing has changed? Regular retesting and regular recheck of backgrounds. I worked for a company, the same company, for almost 37 years. And I had one background check required from HR. Now, I had many background checks done because I applied for different clearances. I was required to have background checks in order to get access to certain pharmaceuticals, to transport certain pharmaceuticals, to work with them, to go into certain types of biological labs and chemistry labs. And so I was kind of in a unique position. But many people with the company, just like me, who started the same day I did, never had another background check in their 37 years. During those 37 years, they could have been out there raping and pillaging and doing all kinds of nonsense. They could have been arrested every weekend. Heck, I found out later that people that I'd worked with had spent weekends in jail. If you have a job, sometimes a judge will sentence you to weekend jail. You get out of work at 5 o'clock on Friday, and by 6 p.m., you report to the county jail, and you get out on Sunday night at 11 p.m. or whatever and go to work the next day. But my question to you is… basically, you know, without cause, unless there's a reason, is it really necessary? And can testing, you know, can it be looked at as maybe distrust? Why am I sending people to get a recheck if I trust them? I can say, you must report if you've been convicted of a crime. I can make that a requirement of a job. Very legal to do that. But if they're not telling me anything, then I have to assume that they're telling me the truth. There's a cost to those rechecks, and it's not cheap. It's usually about... For a good background check, it's $500, which doesn't sound like a lot unless you've got 100,000 employees and you're doing them every three years. Now you're adding up a few million dollars a year. It starts to add up. And if they're not done consistently, if I have mine done every three years but someone else, there was a delay and they got theirs done every four years, I'm open. Companies being opened up to a lawsuit to say that there was a lack of consistency and if there was action taken against me on something and someone else was not subject to it, it's a really big administrative burden. But I asked in the prompt for the discussion several questions about it, and I'd like you to talk about some of the things that we've talked about with background checks, some of the things that maybe you learned in this particular lecture. Hopefully, you learned something, something different, something you hadn't heard before. To understand what you think about background checks and testing and drug testing, things like that, is it really necessary? Does it make the workplace safer? Or do you think it's just an administrative burden and people have private lives, and if it doesn't impact the workplace, why are we looking at it? I'd really like to hear your opinion on that in the discussion this week. So some of the specific threats that personnel security addresses really are workplace violence and kidnapping, terrorism, And violence in common or public venues, right, the things that we apply personnel security tools like these checks and certain protections, executive protections and drug and alcohol and background checks and those types of programs really are made to address problems like workplace violence and kidnapping, terrorism and general violence in the workplace. But let's think about what the definition of workplace violence is. And we all tend to think of that workplace shooting. That's, you know, several people die from someone going into a workplace and shooting it up. And of course, that's workplace violence, right? But verbal harassment, bullying, inappropriate physical conduct, violent acts such as assault. and homicide, but just assault. Those are all workplace violence incidents, and it's not always co-workers. Some of the places where workplace violence takes place might actually, they won't necessarily surprise you, but you'll say, I didn't think about that. So in some cases, the violent acts we're talking about, well, fatalities, right? Those workplace fatalities. In 2022, which is the last year that we have real clear statistics, because these things sometimes are classified and reclassified as we go through. 525 workers were killed due to assault in the workplace. So assault being they were shot, they were hit, they were knifed, whatever the cause, the actual instrument used. 525 workers were killed in the workplace in the United States in 2022. Now, 21 to 22, there were 57,610 injuries reported due to assault in the workplace, which should tell you that there are far more people injured. in workplace violence than killed in workplace violence, which should then lead you to the next thing is that these aren't all necessarily shootings, right? From 2015 to 2019, there were an average of 1.3 million non-fatal violent crimes per year in the workplace. 1.3 million non-fatal violent crimes per year in the workplace. So now we're talking about people who aren't necessarily physically injured, but there was a violent crime. in their workplace, right? It's equivalent to eight non-fatal violent crimes per thousand workers. So, I mean, we're talking about if you have a factory, and there are many of them in the Pittsburgh area and Erie area, a factory where you have 3,000 to 5,000 people working, you're having that year potentially 25 to 45 non-fatal violent crimes committed in the workplace in a year. Now, homicides in 2020, there were 392 workplace homicides. Okay. And the five groups with the highest number of workplace injuries were sales, transportation, management, construction, and production. If you think about sales, you're talking about retail. Shootings like at a bank, a bank robbery gone bad, or a liquor store robbery gone bad. Transportation, you're talking about robberies from... Cab drivers, generally. That's the big one, right? Management, construction, and production, really across the board. One thing that you might find interesting, and because it was always considered and statistically was always true, really, up until around the year 2000, when it started to really level out, most workers killed in the workplace were white, followed by Hispanic, Latino, Black, or African American, and Asian. And if you look at the percentages there... very close to the percentages of that particular race's prevalence in the population itself. So basically, workplace violence was a white crime, right? With the exception of those crimes committed in the commission of a robbery, which tended away from white males, right, which was almost always white male. Now we're seeing... All races involved really in direct proportion to their population generally. And we're seeing both genders involved across the board. Now, professions at risk. Number one is health care. And if you think about that, many assaults take place in the emergency room, both against health care workers from the person who is being treated or because in many health care settings, you have the. The leftovers, if you will, of a fight, right? Someone is brought in, a shooting victim is brought in, and the person didn't finish the job. It's a gang-related thing. Now it's going to take place in the health care place, and the health care workers put at risk. So health care, transportation, and retail workers, among those who face the high rates of workplace violence, those are usually from outsiders, not from their coworkers. Whereas when you found up above with management, construction, and production, those are usually coworkers. In nonviolent fatal crimes, knives are the most common weapon used, followed by firearms and other weapons. So many of these nonfatal violent crimes are knifings. And again, I don't have the breakdown, but I would probably say that those are probably more toward the healthcare, transportation, and retail workers in the commission of a crime as opposed to coworker crime. Simply because coworker crime is usually a fistfight. That's the most common one by far. So what can we do from a personnel security standpoint above and beyond the, you know, checking who's who in the zoo, as we say, right, to make sure that people that we hire and bring into our workplace or bring into our place of business are properly screened in some ways, right? Well, policies, a weapons policy at work or at school. And we have one at the school, and I'm sure every place you work has a weapons policy of some kind. Even if it is just a sign at the door that says no weapons allowed or something in the employee handbook says you can't bring weapons into work. Reporting requirements, that is becoming more and more controversial. Many, many companies had a duty to report. If you knew about something, you must tell management about it. If you knew that Johnny was bringing a gun into work and you have a no weapons policy, if you didn't tell management, you too would be fired. Those are becoming less and less prevalent. I'm not sure why. They're quite effective, quite frankly. And some of the best sources of information are people in the workplace who just don't want to get hurt or don't want others to get hurt. But it is generally falling out of favor. But if you do have a reporting requirement, you should always have a non-retaliation policy. In other words, if you tell me John's carrying a gun to work, I'm pretty sure he's doing it. We interview John. We check John's locker. We permission to do that because it's company property. So we asked John if he's willing to open up his lunchbox. And since he brought it in the workplace, it is now open season on that as well. But we asked him if he wants to open his car in the parking lot. And he says, yeah, sure, no problem. We take a look. There's no weapon. Your company should have a policy that you don't retaliate against that person for making that report if that report was made in good faith. Obviously, training. Run, hide, fight is the common training sponsored by Homeland Security when it comes to workplace violence. And then training in identifying behaviors and indicators of violence, right? And then some awareness training. You have to have constant reinforcement of those policies, and you have to have that training regularly. You can't train people one time on what to do if there's a workplace violence incident and not practice it, not try it. Think about it. When you were a kid, there was a fire drill in your school twice a year at least, probably three times every year. And the fire marshal. required that, the FHIR code required that for very good reason, and that is that people only remember what they did a certain amount of time ago, and they only remember when they practice something, right? You get better when you practice something, and constant reinforcement of your policies is a great preventative measure. So from a personnel security standpoint, if you are going to have personnel security under your venue at some point, don't forget that you can't set it and forget it. You've got to go back in and reinforce all of those trainings and policies. So... I told you earlier I was going to talk a little bit about kidnapping, and really kidnapping has become a problem in private security over the last probably 15 years or so, more so than it was before with the rise of the expat. The expat being a person usually from the United States or Western Europe who takes a job in an emerging economy. So if I am an executive of some kind and I am offered a job in... Let's say, gosh, Venezuela. We do business in Venezuela still, right? Coca-Cola has a bottling plant in Venezuela, and I take the job in Venezuela. I am considered an expat. I'm an expatriate of another country, and I become a very lucrative target because American companies and European companies, especially from Western Europe, are known for paying a ransom if it's asked for. And the differences in economies make kidnapping lucrative in some parts of the world, right? So express kidnapping is even a newer form of this. And in express kidnapping, I am an executive living, let's just say I'm in Mexico, right? Mexican economy is not as robust as the American economy. And the Mexican peso was not very strong against the U.S. dollar. If you have U.S. dollars, you are generally richer than someone who has Mexican pesos in equal amounts, right? The buying power is there. So in express kidnapping, I would be walking down the street or driving in my car, and I would either be forced off the road or grabbed up and thrown in the back of a vehicle and taken to the nearest ATM machine, told to use my ATM card to empty as much as I could get out of my bank account. And then I would be driven back. to the place where I was picked up and thrown out of the car again. Now, you have been kidnapped. You've been robbed, but your person was taken, right? Your freedom was taken from you for a certain amount of time. You were held hostage while you went to the ATM at gunpoint. and emptied out as much as you could get, which is why many ATM accounts, especially when you go overseas, they really limit how much you can take out. I've been in foreign countries where I went to the ATM to get some money just to come home, to have a little pocket cash to get a beer in the airport kind of thing, and I was limited to $100. Now, I assure you that I have a higher... ATM limit in the United States, and I assure you that I have more than $100 in my bank account in a particular time, but that was the most you could get. And part of that is because of express kidnapping and the fact that Americans tend to take out a fair amount of cash, which is really multiplied when you get in certain economies. And political causes tend to put high-profile targets in more jeopardy as well. Pharmaceutical executives, something I know well, were very much in the target, if you will, in certain countries where they would not sell certain drugs. Certain countries, you cannot buy certain drugs that you can buy in the U.S. with a doctor's prescription. And it may be because of religious reasons. It may be because of just the cost of the drug. It may be because that particular country just doesn't believe that they may have a competing product. There's just any number of reasons. But the... Blame for that was pushed back on pharmaceutical execs who are not very popular, quite frankly, any more so than medical insurance companies. And the political causes against them put them at more in jeopardy. So kidnapping is on the rise, and it is not always reported. The good thing about kidnapping, if you want to have a good thing, right? If you kidnap an American executive in most of these economies, the ransom that is asked for is minuscule. by comparison to the movies. You kidnap an American executive in some countries that have a really poor economy, the kidnappers will ask for $25,000 or you're never going to see this person again. And I will tell you that once a report of a kidnapping comes in of an executive, you've spent $25,000 just calling consultants and getting all the other executives together to explain to them what's going on. The fact that the kidnapper wants $25,000 is almost like... Sure. In fact, we'll give you 50 if you can make it quick. Right. So but kidnapping is a is a real problem. And having that intel work around executives will help you. That personnel security type of work will help you thwart those types of kidnappings and keep them at a minimum. Now, other things you can do. Obviously, you need some policies. They may include banned country lists and banned activities and facility lists. When you go to work in your first. real job and you may do some international travel, you may find that if you're going to country A and country B is someplace you've always wanted to go, but it's right across the border, you may not be able to go there. There are a number of banned countries on the U.S. I think there are five or six banned countries on the U.S. Department of State list, but some companies, based on their particular type of work they do, will add other countries to their banned country list and you may not go there. And they've done their homework and said, people in our profession just really shouldn't go there. And banned activities and banned facility lists, that would be, we've done our homework and this hotel is much more dangerous for you to stay in than that hotel. We did a, at Pfizer, we did a check of hotels across different countries and we actually made a list of preferred to less preferred. And it wasn't based on the fact whether they had a pool or whether they had a really good restaurant. It was, did they have a restaurant, which meant you didn't have to go out on the street. Did they have a safe in the room? What was reported crimes in the area? Did they have a telephone in every room, which is not as common as you would think in some countries, right, so that you could call for help? Did they have facilities for executive protection, safe rooms and those kinds of things? Intelligence gathering, always important, right? You have to understand the experience of others and then any temporary change, any political threats. If there's going to be a... A coup in a country, you're not going to send your executives there. And as a personnel security person, you would get that intel and then make that decision. You obviously need to train people when it comes, especially in kidnapping, to victim response and situational awareness. If you're near a street where it's really narrow and you can walk one more block so that you can go down a street that has more space for you to move and more people on the street. Then you don't go down the first street. You walk up a block and come back later on a busy street. Just those little tips. And the victim response, what do you do when you're kidnapped? And personnel security people train. executives, especially in victim response. And then protective details. And this is the one that everybody kind of gets hung up on and says, oh, yeah, well, you've got executive protection, you've got bodyguards. Extremely expensive. And extremely expensive to train people correctly. The old adage is, well, if you're big, you can be a bodyguard. And I've seen that happen. I've seen security people who have done that. They pick their biggest guy and he's going to be the the CEO's bodyguard. How do I put this politely? Big and dumb and little and dumb, doesn't matter. It's still dumb. And you've got somebody who doesn't think on their feet, doesn't matter what their size is, they're going to get themselves or others hurt. And then you also have to remember that if you're watching one person 24 hours a day, if you're working 40 hour weeks, and if you do executive protection work, it actually can be, you have a lot of downtime, but it also can be... ... kind of strenuous. You're doing a lot of stuff. When you are moving, you're moving, right? It requires 4.3 people. Think about that. 40-hour shifts, 168 hours in a week, 24 times 7, 168, you divide it out. You need a staff of 4.3, which is essentially five because you can't get a 0.3 person anymore. So you need five bodyguards to have protection for one person around the clock, not even counting vacations. So if you're going to count... people are going to go on vacation and things like that, and you need supervision, you're going to need a team of about seven to watch one executive 24-7. That's very expensive. They don't come cheap, the good ones, as they shouldn't. Many are retired from the Secret Service and have that type of background or other government agencies. Diplomatic security is also very big in that game. They're not cheap, but to protect one executive, you will spend a good $5 million a year just in the programs of... getting them around, not counting the equipment like cars and protection of their airplanes and things like that. So protective details should be your last resort if you're in private security. You don't want to have bodyguards if you can help it because they ain't cheap and they do need training and they can make mistakes. Okay, that's it for the lecture. We came in about 52 minutes, a little longer than I wanted to go, but about the length of a class, so we'll call it good. Deliverables this week. Do the discussion on personnel security programs. I want you to try to add in some of the stuff you heard in this lecture or you got from the reading. The reading is the JASCA text, Chapter 5. But I also want to know your opinion. And I want you, in your responses to others, you'll do initial posts by Thursday before midnight, essentially 11.59, and the responses before Sunday at 11.59. If you get them done earlier, happy days. You can take the rest of the week off and... and relax, do your other work. But I do need to have them done by then. But I want to know your opinion. And in your responses, try to find somebody who you disagree with. And I want to see how you collegially, oh, I can't even say that, how in a collegial way, you disagree with someone. I see your point, but, you know, I understand where you're coming from. However, I find that this. And you're going to find that people have different opinions, and I want you to be nice about having different opinions. That's some of the practice in this is being able to disagree with others in a really nice, polite, respectful way and understand that there are a lot of schools of thought on background checks and drug tests especially about whether they're even required, whether they're fair. You know, why should one company do it and not another if they're competitors? It's really kind of an interesting thing. So. With that, those are your deliverables for this week. Make sure you get those done. And I will see you in week five in person in the classroom on Monday where we'll start talking about informational security. And we'll do another exercise, if you will, on informational security in week five. And you'll have the chance to do some quick presentations. Those of you who did not present in week three will have a chance. Some of you will have a chance to do it in week five. when we go out and do another field exercise on informational security. With that, have a great week, and I will see you on campus next week.

I teach a semester-long class in the intro side of it, and frankly, I worked in it for a very long time, and it took me the better part of 10 years to really get good at it. Because there are so many devices and combinations and things that you have to consider when you put in a physical security system, when you use devices, be they electronic or otherwise. But I'm glad you guys got a little taste of it, got to go out and see some of the things on campus that could be considered physical security. And there were some unique things that you brought to my attention. One thing that we didn't talk about this week, but I still want to keep on our radar, is I asked you in your homework to do one thing extra.

last week, and that was to write down two or three things that you see that could improve the private security industry's reputation. We kind of determined in our very first session, we went right to the bad side, right? People don't think very much of private security sometimes, and the police who we rely on, and I think who rely on private security more than they like to say, don't really have a trust with private security.

And I asked you to write down some things that private security could do or Conversely, if you are a cybersecurity person and you wanted to go that direction, some things that you could do right now as a cybersecurity manager, which is what all of you hopefully will aspire to be if that is your chosen profession. And to write down some things that you could do now that would keep you from falling into that pitfall because something else is coming down the pike. We all know that, right? Things don't change.

The guy who was the farrier who put the shoes on the horses always thought that. he was going to be in demand because everybody needed horses to get around. And then all of a sudden he was replaced by the tire guy, right? And then the tire guy was replaced by these major tire shops that do this in bulk and places like Walmart that set up shops that will sell tires all day long, fairly cheap, at least by the standards of automotive repair. And something else will come along.

The tires on the cars will eventually be made of something different. Or, as we all probably know, at some point, they won't have tires at all. They'll be hovercraft. Or we will switch to mass transportation of some kind, and that tire guy is going to be out of business.

And there are certain things that you could probably do now to keep yourself relevant as a profession and to keep yourself relevant in terms of reputation as a profession. I still want you to have those things. I want you to think about those.

We're going to go back as we go through the semester and look at the different things that private security does. I want you to keep that initial list, and I'll ask you to go in and add other things to the list as we go through our various weeks. So I didn't forget about that.

And after the end of next week, when we do informational security, which is not cybersecurity, we will go back and revisit that list. So what we're doing now is we're moving through the security triad, physical security being one leg, the next one being personnel security is what we're going to talk about today. And then next week, we will get to informational security, which is more so information in hard form on paper, information that is delivered from one person to another in a non-electronic means, some social engineering, things like that.

And then we'll talk a little bit about convergence. how private security, the type that I'm teaching, will eventually converge with cybersecurity to form an integrated and converged security model. But first, we'll start with personnel security. And the definition we're going to use is simply the protection of people. Now, we could say that physical security was kind of that too, right?

The devices are used. But in this case, we're not using devices. We're using programs. Some examples of personnel security would be executive protection.

Using bodyguards to guard people whose presence is necessary for either cultural reasons, social reasons, government reasons, or commerce reasons. Background checks, which we're going to do a discussion this week on background checks. And although I want you to put some elements of what we talk about in here and show what you know, I'm going to be asking for your opinion on certain things about background checks.

And I think it's pretty important for you to kind of... Get that in your mind as you start to think about going into that first professional job. And then private investigations, the types of things that people contract for with private investigators, both companies and individuals, for the protection of themselves from other people.

And generally, when we talk about personnel security, you'll find that the other people we're protecting ourselves from are people who are very close to us, especially in the workplace. So one of the first basic questions, since we've already looked at physical security and, you know, the lockdown kind of scenario is, you know, how do we apply physical versus personnel? And the answer is we don't. We apply them both, plus informational in many ways, in a really concerted way.

And if you think about that layered protection that we had in physical security, we were really talking about the different physical layers, you know, locks and then maybe. card readers, and then maybe a keypad, and then maybe something different. So we had these good layers of security before somebody got to our protected asset. In this case, we're going to actually layer different types of security in the security triad. So we'll have some physical things, we'll have some personnel things, and we'll have some informational things, perhaps, kind of like the rings of an onion, just in a different way.

But sometimes one leg matches a little better than another. If you are protecting diamonds, you're... probably going to have a very heavy physical security presence. If you're protecting information, people's personal information, you may have a very heavy informational security presence. And if you're protecting people from people, right, from the things, the other bad things that people might do to them, you'd be a little heavy on the personnel side.

But don't think about, okay, I have this security problem, which one am I going to use? You're going to use all of them in a concerted way. So let's put that into practice.

So you're the security manager for an auto assembly plant. I don't know if any of you have ever been in an auto assembly plant, but they're very cool places, very structured. Everybody has a job to do. Every piece of equipment has a place in the line. Henry Ford really, when he set up his assembly line model, really set the stage for this really structured way to put cars together.

And in your factory, you're going to put a certain truck model together. pickup truck model together from components, and then they're going to paint the body. That's what your factory does.

You get components from places, you put the trucks together, and then you paint the body. Then you ship it off to someplace else for testing, quality testing and storage and distribution. So you have 1,500 catalytic converters on hand. You need that many because you're making, say, 100 cars a day, and you want a two-week supply plus a little bit of an extra.

of catalytic converters so that you can put them on the trucks as they come down the assembly line. And I don't know if you know anything about catalytic converters. They're used to convert some of the exhaust to pull the extra fuel back out of it. Again, I guess is the simplest way to describe it. And if somebody is an auto mechanic, I'll stand corrected and you can give me another way to describe that.

But each one of those catalytic converters contains seven grams of platinum, seven grams of palladium, excuse me, and two grams of rhodium. So they have these precious metals because that's used as part of the chemical reaction to convert some of the exhaust back to usable fuel. So the recent spot price of platinum was $32 a gram, and rhodium was $160 a gram. So essentially, if you've got seven platinum at $32, you've got $210 plus, you've got $224 worth of platinum. And at $160 a gram, you've got two grams of rhodium, you've got another $320.

In rhodium, you've got about $500 worth of precious metals in that catalytic converter. So you have 1,500 of them on site. You've got a fairly robust amount of money there. Now, the paint coating that you're using when you paint these trucks that you're going to do, it's highly destructive to the environment if you release more than 20 gallons into the ground or groundwater.

So you can't really have a spill. And you have 10,000 gallons of that on hand because, remember, you're making... 1,400 cars or trucks, rather, in a two-week period, you can't be going buying this stuff by the court. You have to have a lot of it on hand. So if you've got a problem, if 20 gallons gets released and you've got 10,000 gallons on hand, you have some environmental concerns there, and it is a security concern as well.

So how would you apply the triad to this? So you've got these materials, and you know that you've got a problem with one for theft. The catalytic converters and specifically the precious metals inside of them, which is not that hard to remove.

People have catalytic converters stolen all the time from their cars in cities simply for the precious metals. And then you have another one that is a problem of carelessness. If someone was careless and released that painting coating into the ground, you would have a major environmental issue, which would cause you great reputational harm.

great harm to the environment, and certainly a reportable incident to the Environmental Protection Agency. All of those things are very bad. So for the theft issue, you might want to go with more physical security, right?

You might want to lock the catalytic converters up. You wouldn't want 1,500 of them sitting on the shelf next to the tires and the other. engine parts that you've got that are worth a little less, the more expensive engine parts, and particularly those that have precious metals that can be fairly easily sold, you'd want to lock those up separately.

So if nothing else, you may want to put them in a locked room, right? With access control and only certain people can have access and maybe cameras inside the room to see how many people take out and have them sign out, right? A process to do that. With the paint coating, if someone got careless, they may cause that release.

You'd want training, right, from the safety side, and you'd want to have safety protections in. But from the security side, you'd want to lean on personnel security. You would want to potentially have drug screening. I mean, regardless of how you feel about drug use, recreational or otherwise, when people are high or drunk, they are less capable of doing tasks that require some level of skill. I mean, that is a given.

It's why we... in law enforcement rely on the whole, you know, field sobriety test. You can't walk the straight line if you're drunk. You can't say the alphabet backwards, although I'm not so sure I could say the alphabet backwards, stone cold sober. But nonetheless, you might want to use drug screening.

So in this particular case, you've got two things going on in the same place. And one, you're going to rely on physical protections. And the other, you're going to rely on drug screening. Now, when we go back to those catalytic converters sitting in that locked room, Would you not want to know that the people that you are letting in there, those who do have access to go get them who work in the factory, have not been arrested for the sale of stolen precious metals in the past? So you may also want to have the physical protections of the locked room with card readers and cameras and whatever other devices you see fit, but also make sure that there's a background check on those people to make sure they don't have a history of doing exactly what you hope they're not going to do by putting in those physical protections.

So what it really boiled down to was we looked at those threats, the threat of theft and the threat of an environmental issue, a safety issue in this case. But both of them required some security component to help mitigate those. So when we look at the different threats, they don't always fall so neatly into lists as I have them here.

But you will find that you will generally use more physical security devices to combat theft and compromise of a resource. against vandalism, and acts against resources other than people. If you're protecting a thing, generally speaking, you're going to use more physical protections. Now, when you talk about violence against employees, customers, and visitors, fraud, harassment, threats, and kidnapping, and kidnapping is a big thing, and I think we'll talk a little bit before we're done here about express kidnapping. You may find that interesting.

You're going to use a lot of personnel security. You're going to use a lot of... things like checks, background checks, and credit checks, and employment histories, and education checks, and those kinds of things to make sure people are who they say they are. Before we go too much farther, I wanted to kind of strike that last point home, knowing who someone is. I did a case probably, oh, it's been a good 10 years now anyway.

And the reason that it sticks out in my mind is not simply because of how how stupid we were in allowing this to happen. But because I got to work it with a really great friend of mine who we didn't get to work a lot of casework together. We both were doing investigations around different parts of the globe and our paths didn't cross very often. And in this particular case, they did.

And so we got a call about a potential theft. What had happened? We had a person that we hired as a contract employee. in a financial center in Memphis, Tennessee, and she was going to be the SAP guru.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with SAP, but SAP is a program that really in industry, and I'm sure that some of you used it for other things, but it really follows everything from cradle to grave. You use SAP to order your materials. You use SAP to plan your production.

You use SAP to monitor the stages of your production. Then SAP keeps your inventory. SAP helps you with distribution. Basically, it follows every component through as they're combined to make a product and out the door, and then takes care of even charging your customers for it and bringing it back in.

You pay for your raw materials. It follows the raw materials through the entire process as far as its financials and where it is in the process, and then sees it go out the door. It's able to help you control your spend in every part of a process in manufacturing. It's used for other things, but that's generally how we used it in manufacturing.

In this particular case… The financial center was used to pay suppliers. When someone did something for us. we have to pay them, right? So they supplied us with widgets and we needed a lot of widgets. We bought widgets and then we proved that the widgets were used in production and they were of good quality and they were tested, gets to the payment part.

And then the SAP person in the financial center would approve the payment and code in the checks. And the check then would be, essentially, there were some printed checks and others were electronic transfer, which is more and more common, although in many countries you can't do electronic transfer, so you must do checks. So the combination of both. They hired this person as a contractor, and they paid him a salary of $125,000 a year, which was a bargain for someone who really knew SAP. What they found was she had gone in and changed the coding on the checks and the electronic transfers.

Instead of going to the bank accounts of our suppliers, they were going to a bank account that she set up. And she did this for a week. And she was a little bit, she didn't quite know how many controls we had in place.

She probably could have hit us for a lot more, but she got us for $100,000 in that week. Now, when we started the investigation, one of the first things we asked was her Internet history, right, to see who maybe she was, what she was looking for. We asked for her email and any type of messaging that was on her company computer that we could get to, see if she was talking to somebody else in the company that was helping her.

And the very first thing that she looked up, she got her Internet account. And she signed onto her email and set that up. And then she went on the internet and typed in, what is SAP?

Not a very highly trained person, yet we hired her. And when we did walk her out, when she was actually fired, right, we found a book with names and social security numbers she had used to be hired as the SAP guru, or not the SAP guru, but the billing guru in other places. She'd never used SAP before, but she'd ripped people off in this billing scheme before.

So why not? So the importance of this background check, just, you know, you can't overemphasize the fact that you need to know who's who in the zoo. So that's just one of the basic personnel security tools, right?

Background checks and searches. We have testing for alcohol, drugs, or illegal substances. Not necessary everywhere, right?

I mean, would I test somebody for, you know, drug use if I was going to put them to work, I don't know, doing landscaping? If they were going to use... a power equipment. Maybe I could say you're not using drugs while you're on the job. I don't know if I would go through doing a drug test on that person.

Is it necessary, right? Maybe that's not the best example, but if the person was going to work in a pharmacy, yeah, they're going to need to do a drug test because we're not going to put the kid in the candy store, right? So testing for alcohol, drugs, and illegal substances. Risk assessments related to executive threats. Executives get threatened all the time.

We all know not too long ago, The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered on the street in New York, coming out of one hotel, going to another for a meeting. And in this particular case, it wasn't very sophisticated of a scheme. It was just somebody who wanted him dead because they didn't like UnitedHealthcare turning down claims, and they just went ahead and acted as a lone wolf. But for the most part, you get threats to executives, and you do a risk assessment on those threats. They come in all the time.

I can tell you that the company I worked for and other companies that we worked with, by comparison, it's not unusual for a Fortune 500 company to get two or three a week letters saying, you know, I'm going to kill this person or that person because of this or because of that. It's very common. And then, of course, risk assessments related to specific organizational functions. So, again, you know, is X. Meaning Twitter, right?

More vulnerable today than it was six months ago? I would say watching the news, there are a number of people who don't like Elon Musk today. He's very outspoken politically.

And some people love him and some people don't love him. And I'm sure he gets a lot more threats. His specific organizational function, being one of social media, and one that makes people mad to start with in many cases, you need to do a special risk assessment to that. If you worked in an abortion clinic, if you worked in a, gosh, there's any number of industries that people don't really get.

Healthcare, right? Healthcare insurance. UnitedHealthcare probably should have been doing better risk assessments because of the type of organization they were. Nobody really loves their health insurance company.

Some are better than others, but I can't say that anybody really just jumps up and down since they love their health insurance company or their car insurance company or their mortgage company. or the servicer of their student loan, or as we know from our own experiment in class, no one really loves their cell phone carrier. Those types of organizations know they're not loved. They should be doing better risk assessments.

Those are the types of personnel security tools that make a company more successful in thwarting threats from a security perspective. So what should we be looking for and what can we look for in a background check? And we have to stress what we can look for because there are many things we can't look for. So criminal records obviously are part of the equation.

But we can look for felonies and misdemeanors, but only convictions. If you are arrested for murder and you were tried for murder and you were found not guilty, you do not have a murder conviction. You do not have a criminal record for murder.

Now, there may be a court record somewhere that shows that you went on trial, but that is not going to be released in a background check. Convictions only. Only if you were convicted of the crime. And only if that crime is related to the position for which you have applied. So I usually use this example.

If you are going to work at Amazon and you are going to pick products off the shelves, right? Although they do this through an automated fashion, obviously, it would make Amazon successful. But there is some hand pick and pack going on. Right. Machines shut down or specialty items.

There are some items that the machines aren't going to just pick off the thing and put in a box for you. You have to go and get them. Right.

And if you're going to do that and then you're going to seal boxes and you're going to stack boxes and you're never going to drive an Amazon truck convictions for drunk driving unless they show some sort of pattern that would make you less successful on the job. So, for instance, in the state of Michigan where I'm a resident right now, three drunk driving convictions, you are a felon. If someone had three drunk driving convictions, I may be able to make the case that that felony conviction that they have shows a pattern of behavior of not following rules. And therefore, I think that they are not acceptable candidate for a job.

I may be fought in court by that applicant, but I could probably make that case. But in general, if the job does not require. Anything that's close to what the crime was, it is very hard for you to turn that person down. Even in the case, and this has been tried in the courts and it's very tricky, in the case of someone who has a crime against a child, if there are no children in the workplace, it is very hard to say that they are not qualified for the job. Someone who has a conviction for domestic violence, they beat their husband or their wife.

If their husband or their wife does not work in that particular facility where you're going to have them work, it may be hard for you to keep them out. The only way you can come back and say that they have exhibited violent tendencies that put your other employees at risk. But it is very hard.

You have to make a judgment decision on that. But just understand, it's very important to understand that it must be a conviction and it must have some relationship to the job being sought. You can look at civil records, and specifically you're looking for excessive litigation against former employers.

You're going to hire somebody, and if they've sued the last 20 places they've worked, right, for discrimination, for unsafe work, for wrongful discharge, for any number of things. But every place they've worked, they've sued. You want to know that, and the civil records will show you that. But you're looking for excessive litigation.

Residential history. They always ask you, where have you lived the last seven years, right? And in many cases, what you're looking for is you're asking them, where have you lived? Well, your background check is going to tell you where they lived.

And if the person said, well, I lived in Pennsylvania, and then I lived in Michigan for a while, and then I lived in Ohio, and that's it. You know, I'm only 25 years old. And you run that background check and found out that they lived for six months to a year in New York and didn't report that.

It may mean that you want to go back when you do your criminal history, because criminal histories are done state by state. There is no 50-state criminal history check. A company that says they're going to do a national check for you is actually doing 50 individual state checks. They've got it automated, but you have to go to each individual one for a search, and they're all a little different the way they go about doing the releases. You may want to find out if there was anything going on in New York.

The company that does your background check for you and almost always contracted out companies to do this. may skip New York if the person didn't report New York. So you want to do a residential history before you do the criminal so you know where they've been.

You want to look at employment history, obviously, right? And the only thing you're going to be able to get from that is the start-stop date, the position, and the salary. When you put down that you worked somewhere in the past, it is very rare, and I will say it is the very bad employer.

Someone who really doesn't know what's going to hurt them that gives anything more than the day you started, the day you stopped, the position you held, and the salary when you left. That is all that they will release. When you put down that I worked at Burger King and now I'm putting in for a job at McDonald's.

When McDonald's calls Burger King, they will say, yep, he worked here from September 1st until October 15th of 2023. He was a fry cook and his final salary was $13 an hour. And if the person says, what kind of employee was he? The smart person at Burger King says, he worked here from these dates.

This was his position and this was his salary. It just repeats that part. And many companies have contracted that out now just so that happens, so that's all people tell you. Because you can defame someone very easily by giving a job reference when they're only looking for an employment history and that's all they have the permission to get. If someone wants a job reference, you will need to get something in writing from them saying it's okay to release that information.

Somebody puts you down as a reference. You get a note. When he puts me down as a reference, and several students have done that in the past, puts me down as a reference for a job, I get a note saying so-and-so has asked us to use you as a reference. What can you tell us about them? I always say, can I please get a signed release from that person?

And companies have those. You sign the application and they will provide that to a reference. You always want to do that because you don't want to say anything good or bad about anybody.

Unless you're sure they know you're going to say it. Or at least go and check with that person and say, did you use me as a reference because I'm going to give one? You okay with that? Okay, great.

Educational records and certifications, just to make sure that they're compliant with the needs of the role. If the job requires a certificate of completion of a job of a school in radiology to work in a hospital in a radiology department, you want to make sure the person is a... radiologist, right? Doesn't mean that, you know, if they put the job up as, you know, we're looking for a computer operator, a bachelor's degree required.

Doesn't mean they can't hire you without the bachelor's degree, but you're looking for an educational record and certifications that make sure the person is legally able to provide the services you're going to contract for. Same with military records. You're looking for skills claimed, the dates of service, and the discharge status. Any of those can be used, the dates of service, basically to make sure there's no holes in their service dates for different jobs.

If they claim they have certain skills that they gained in the military, the military discharge will say what schools they've gone to and what specialty they had. You're hiring someone to go work on an aircraft and they just got out of the Air Force. You say, oh, okay, well, they just got out of the Air Force.

I'm going to hire them to work on passenger aircraft for Delta Airlines. It would be really bad if you found out that they were indeed a mess cook. And they were making eggs rather than fixing airplanes. So those skills claimed on military records are used.

The discharge status, obviously, if they have a dishonorable discharge, that is only given to someone who has been convicted of a crime. So you want to be able to match that up because the state checks for those criminal records will not show that. The military service record would show that. So it's really just another check of convictions.

And then personal references. If they've been asked for, if permission has been given by the person who is applying for the job to use personal references, then you could gain new information by talking with personal references that might open up other questions about those things above there. But that's what you use in a background check.

Kind of important to understand those things, and especially with you guys who are going out to find jobs now. You know, look, it's convictions. It's relatable to the job, those types of things.

It's not as... If you have an indiscretion in your past, it is not as bad as you think normally when it comes to background checks for jobs, unless you're conviction. If you've not spent time in prison, you're probably going to be OK applying for jobs.

So why do we test for alcohol, drugs and illegal substances? Obviously, the safety side. Right. But also there is evidence, true statistical evidence, to show that there is an increased.

time for people who use drugs and alcohol even outside the workplace. There's decreased efficiency because of that increased sick time, right? If you've got five people working a job and only three of them show up, it's not going to be as efficient as if you had five.

There's an increased number of workplace accidents. And as we talked about with our paint example, right, the regulatory oversight comes if you have too many accidents, you've got OSHA and others breathing down your neck and sending people in to inspect you all the time, decreases efficiency. There are increased workers' compensation claims, which increases the cost for the company.

And every one of these things, right? People missing work. workplace accidents, workers' comp claims and people not being at work because they're out on comp, all of that decreases morale among your coworkers and your other workers.

And so you are indeed allowed to test for alcohol, drugs, and illegal substances. I would just say that not all companies do it. Less and less companies are doing it now. And they are going to a model where unless we see that the behavior of the person is being impacted and we believe it might be because of illegal drugs or substances, alcohol, whatever, then we're not going to really dig too deep in that. If they see that you have increased sick time and believe it's because of alcohol and drugs, they just reserve the right to send you for a drug test then rather than to then make you ineligible right out of the chute.

So this week, and there's still a little bit more to go here, guys, so bear with me. But this week in your discussion, we're going to see how you feel about the ongoing verification debate. And Realistically, once you have a background check and you get the job, should there be a new background check every once in a while to make sure that nothing has changed?

Regular retesting and regular recheck of backgrounds. I worked for a company, the same company, for almost 37 years. And I had one background check required from HR. Now, I had many background checks done because I applied for different clearances. I was required to have background checks in order to get access to certain pharmaceuticals, to transport certain pharmaceuticals, to work with them, to go into certain types of biological labs and chemistry labs.

And so I was kind of in a unique position. But many people with the company, just like me, who started the same day I did, never had another background check in their 37 years. During those 37 years, they could have been out there raping and pillaging and doing all kinds of nonsense. They could have been arrested every weekend.

Heck, I found out later that people that I'd worked with had spent weekends in jail. If you have a job, sometimes a judge will sentence you to weekend jail. You get out of work at 5 o'clock on Friday, and by 6 p.m., you report to the county jail, and you get out on Sunday night at 11 p.m. or whatever and go to work the next day. But my question to you is… basically, you know, without cause, unless there's a reason, is it really necessary?

And can testing, you know, can it be looked at as maybe distrust? Why am I sending people to get a recheck if I trust them? I can say, you must report if you've been convicted of a crime.

I can make that a requirement of a job. Very legal to do that. But if they're not telling me anything, then I have to assume that they're telling me the truth. There's a cost to those rechecks, and it's not cheap. It's usually about...

For a good background check, it's $500, which doesn't sound like a lot unless you've got 100,000 employees and you're doing them every three years. Now you're adding up a few million dollars a year. It starts to add up. And if they're not done consistently, if I have mine done every three years but someone else, there was a delay and they got theirs done every four years, I'm open. Companies being opened up to a lawsuit to say that there was a lack of consistency and if there was action taken against me on something and someone else was not subject to it, it's a really big administrative burden.

But I asked in the prompt for the discussion several questions about it, and I'd like you to talk about some of the things that we've talked about with background checks, some of the things that maybe you learned in this particular lecture. Hopefully, you learned something, something different, something you hadn't heard before. To understand what you think about background checks and testing and drug testing, things like that, is it really necessary? Does it make the workplace safer? Or do you think it's just an administrative burden and people have private lives, and if it doesn't impact the workplace, why are we looking at it?

I'd really like to hear your opinion on that in the discussion this week. So some of the specific threats that personnel security addresses really are workplace violence and kidnapping, terrorism, And violence in common or public venues, right, the things that we apply personnel security tools like these checks and certain protections, executive protections and drug and alcohol and background checks and those types of programs really are made to address problems like workplace violence and kidnapping, terrorism and general violence in the workplace. But let's think about what the definition of workplace violence is.

And we all tend to think of that workplace shooting. That's, you know, several people die from someone going into a workplace and shooting it up. And of course, that's workplace violence, right? But verbal harassment, bullying, inappropriate physical conduct, violent acts such as assault.

and homicide, but just assault. Those are all workplace violence incidents, and it's not always co-workers. Some of the places where workplace violence takes place might actually, they won't necessarily surprise you, but you'll say, I didn't think about that. So in some cases, the violent acts we're talking about, well, fatalities, right?

Those workplace fatalities. In 2022, which is the last year that we have real clear statistics, because these things sometimes are classified and reclassified as we go through. 525 workers were killed due to assault in the workplace.

So assault being they were shot, they were hit, they were knifed, whatever the cause, the actual instrument used. 525 workers were killed in the workplace in the United States in 2022. Now, 21 to 22, there were 57,610 injuries reported due to assault in the workplace, which should tell you that there are far more people injured. in workplace violence than killed in workplace violence, which should then lead you to the next thing is that these aren't all necessarily shootings, right?

From 2015 to 2019, there were an average of 1.3 million non-fatal violent crimes per year in the workplace. 1.3 million non-fatal violent crimes per year in the workplace. So now we're talking about people who aren't necessarily physically injured, but there was a violent crime.

in their workplace, right? It's equivalent to eight non-fatal violent crimes per thousand workers. So, I mean, we're talking about if you have a factory, and there are many of them in the Pittsburgh area and Erie area, a factory where you have 3,000 to 5,000 people working, you're having that year potentially 25 to 45 non-fatal violent crimes committed in the workplace in a year. Now, homicides in 2020, there were 392 workplace homicides.

Okay. And the five groups with the highest number of workplace injuries were sales, transportation, management, construction, and production. If you think about sales, you're talking about retail.

Shootings like at a bank, a bank robbery gone bad, or a liquor store robbery gone bad. Transportation, you're talking about robberies from... Cab drivers, generally. That's the big one, right?

Management, construction, and production, really across the board. One thing that you might find interesting, and because it was always considered and statistically was always true, really, up until around the year 2000, when it started to really level out, most workers killed in the workplace were white, followed by Hispanic, Latino, Black, or African American, and Asian. And if you look at the percentages there...

very close to the percentages of that particular race's prevalence in the population itself. So basically, workplace violence was a white crime, right? With the exception of those crimes committed in the commission of a robbery, which tended away from white males, right, which was almost always white male.

Now we're seeing... All races involved really in direct proportion to their population generally. And we're seeing both genders involved across the board. Now, professions at risk.

Number one is health care. And if you think about that, many assaults take place in the emergency room, both against health care workers from the person who is being treated or because in many health care settings, you have the. The leftovers, if you will, of a fight, right? Someone is brought in, a shooting victim is brought in, and the person didn't finish the job.

It's a gang-related thing. Now it's going to take place in the health care place, and the health care workers put at risk. So health care, transportation, and retail workers, among those who face the high rates of workplace violence, those are usually from outsiders, not from their coworkers.

Whereas when you found up above with management, construction, and production, those are usually coworkers. In nonviolent fatal crimes, knives are the most common weapon used, followed by firearms and other weapons. So many of these nonfatal violent crimes are knifings. And again, I don't have the breakdown, but I would probably say that those are probably more toward the healthcare, transportation, and retail workers in the commission of a crime as opposed to coworker crime. Simply because coworker crime is usually a fistfight.

That's the most common one by far. So what can we do from a personnel security standpoint above and beyond the, you know, checking who's who in the zoo, as we say, right, to make sure that people that we hire and bring into our workplace or bring into our place of business are properly screened in some ways, right? Well, policies, a weapons policy at work or at school. And we have one at the school, and I'm sure every place you work has a weapons policy of some kind. Even if it is just a sign at the door that says no weapons allowed or something in the employee handbook says you can't bring weapons into work.

Reporting requirements, that is becoming more and more controversial. Many, many companies had a duty to report. If you knew about something, you must tell management about it. If you knew that Johnny was bringing a gun into work and you have a no weapons policy, if you didn't tell management, you too would be fired.

Those are becoming less and less prevalent. I'm not sure why. They're quite effective, quite frankly.

And some of the best sources of information are people in the workplace who just don't want to get hurt or don't want others to get hurt. But it is generally falling out of favor. But if you do have a reporting requirement, you should always have a non-retaliation policy.

In other words, if you tell me John's carrying a gun to work, I'm pretty sure he's doing it. We interview John. We check John's locker. We permission to do that because it's company property.

So we asked John if he's willing to open up his lunchbox. And since he brought it in the workplace, it is now open season on that as well. But we asked him if he wants to open his car in the parking lot.

And he says, yeah, sure, no problem. We take a look. There's no weapon.

Your company should have a policy that you don't retaliate against that person for making that report if that report was made in good faith. Obviously, training. Run, hide, fight is the common training sponsored by Homeland Security when it comes to workplace violence.

And then training in identifying behaviors and indicators of violence, right? And then some awareness training. You have to have constant reinforcement of those policies, and you have to have that training regularly.

You can't train people one time on what to do if there's a workplace violence incident and not practice it, not try it. Think about it. When you were a kid, there was a fire drill in your school twice a year at least, probably three times every year. And the fire marshal. required that, the FHIR code required that for very good reason, and that is that people only remember what they did a certain amount of time ago, and they only remember when they practice something, right?

You get better when you practice something, and constant reinforcement of your policies is a great preventative measure. So from a personnel security standpoint, if you are going to have personnel security under your venue at some point, don't forget that you can't set it and forget it. You've got to go back in and reinforce all of those trainings and policies.

So... I told you earlier I was going to talk a little bit about kidnapping, and really kidnapping has become a problem in private security over the last probably 15 years or so, more so than it was before with the rise of the expat. The expat being a person usually from the United States or Western Europe who takes a job in an emerging economy.

So if I am an executive of some kind and I am offered a job in... Let's say, gosh, Venezuela. We do business in Venezuela still, right? Coca-Cola has a bottling plant in Venezuela, and I take the job in Venezuela. I am considered an expat.

I'm an expatriate of another country, and I become a very lucrative target because American companies and European companies, especially from Western Europe, are known for paying a ransom if it's asked for. And the differences in economies make kidnapping lucrative in some parts of the world, right? So express kidnapping is even a newer form of this. And in express kidnapping, I am an executive living, let's just say I'm in Mexico, right? Mexican economy is not as robust as the American economy.

And the Mexican peso was not very strong against the U.S. dollar. If you have U.S. dollars, you are generally richer than someone who has Mexican pesos in equal amounts, right? The buying power is there. So in express kidnapping, I would be walking down the street or driving in my car, and I would either be forced off the road or grabbed up and thrown in the back of a vehicle and taken to the nearest ATM machine, told to use my ATM card to empty as much as I could get out of my bank account.

And then I would be driven back. to the place where I was picked up and thrown out of the car again. Now, you have been kidnapped.

You've been robbed, but your person was taken, right? Your freedom was taken from you for a certain amount of time. You were held hostage while you went to the ATM at gunpoint.

and emptied out as much as you could get, which is why many ATM accounts, especially when you go overseas, they really limit how much you can take out. I've been in foreign countries where I went to the ATM to get some money just to come home, to have a little pocket cash to get a beer in the airport kind of thing, and I was limited to $100. Now, I assure you that I have a higher...

ATM limit in the United States, and I assure you that I have more than $100 in my bank account in a particular time, but that was the most you could get. And part of that is because of express kidnapping and the fact that Americans tend to take out a fair amount of cash, which is really multiplied when you get in certain economies. And political causes tend to put high-profile targets in more jeopardy as well. Pharmaceutical executives, something I know well, were very much in the target, if you will, in certain countries where they would not sell certain drugs.

Certain countries, you cannot buy certain drugs that you can buy in the U.S. with a doctor's prescription. And it may be because of religious reasons. It may be because of just the cost of the drug.

It may be because that particular country just doesn't believe that they may have a competing product. There's just any number of reasons. But the...

Blame for that was pushed back on pharmaceutical execs who are not very popular, quite frankly, any more so than medical insurance companies. And the political causes against them put them at more in jeopardy. So kidnapping is on the rise, and it is not always reported. The good thing about kidnapping, if you want to have a good thing, right?

If you kidnap an American executive in most of these economies, the ransom that is asked for is minuscule. by comparison to the movies. You kidnap an American executive in some countries that have a really poor economy, the kidnappers will ask for $25,000 or you're never going to see this person again.

And I will tell you that once a report of a kidnapping comes in of an executive, you've spent $25,000 just calling consultants and getting all the other executives together to explain to them what's going on. The fact that the kidnapper wants $25,000 is almost like... Sure. In fact, we'll give you 50 if you can make it quick. Right.

So but kidnapping is a is a real problem. And having that intel work around executives will help you. That personnel security type of work will help you thwart those types of kidnappings and keep them at a minimum. Now, other things you can do.

Obviously, you need some policies. They may include banned country lists and banned activities and facility lists. When you go to work in your first.

real job and you may do some international travel, you may find that if you're going to country A and country B is someplace you've always wanted to go, but it's right across the border, you may not be able to go there. There are a number of banned countries on the U.S. I think there are five or six banned countries on the U.S. Department of State list, but some companies, based on their particular type of work they do, will add other countries to their banned country list and you may not go there. And they've done their homework and said, people in our profession just really shouldn't go there.

And banned activities and banned facility lists, that would be, we've done our homework and this hotel is much more dangerous for you to stay in than that hotel. We did a, at Pfizer, we did a check of hotels across different countries and we actually made a list of preferred to less preferred. And it wasn't based on the fact whether they had a pool or whether they had a really good restaurant. It was, did they have a restaurant, which meant you didn't have to go out on the street.

Did they have a safe in the room? What was reported crimes in the area? Did they have a telephone in every room, which is not as common as you would think in some countries, right, so that you could call for help? Did they have facilities for executive protection, safe rooms and those kinds of things?

Intelligence gathering, always important, right? You have to understand the experience of others and then any temporary change, any political threats. If there's going to be a...

A coup in a country, you're not going to send your executives there. And as a personnel security person, you would get that intel and then make that decision. You obviously need to train people when it comes, especially in kidnapping, to victim response and situational awareness. If you're near a street where it's really narrow and you can walk one more block so that you can go down a street that has more space for you to move and more people on the street. Then you don't go down the first street.

You walk up a block and come back later on a busy street. Just those little tips. And the victim response, what do you do when you're kidnapped?

And personnel security people train. executives, especially in victim response. And then protective details. And this is the one that everybody kind of gets hung up on and says, oh, yeah, well, you've got executive protection, you've got bodyguards.

Extremely expensive. And extremely expensive to train people correctly. The old adage is, well, if you're big, you can be a bodyguard.

And I've seen that happen. I've seen security people who have done that. They pick their biggest guy and he's going to be the the CEO's bodyguard. How do I put this politely? Big and dumb and little and dumb, doesn't matter.

It's still dumb. And you've got somebody who doesn't think on their feet, doesn't matter what their size is, they're going to get themselves or others hurt. And then you also have to remember that if you're watching one person 24 hours a day, if you're working 40 hour weeks, and if you do executive protection work, it actually can be, you have a lot of downtime, but it also can be... ...

kind of strenuous. You're doing a lot of stuff. When you are moving, you're moving, right?

It requires 4.3 people. Think about that. 40-hour shifts, 168 hours in a week, 24 times 7, 168, you divide it out.

You need a staff of 4.3, which is essentially five because you can't get a 0.3 person anymore. So you need five bodyguards to have protection for one person around the clock, not even counting vacations. So if you're going to count... people are going to go on vacation and things like that, and you need supervision, you're going to need a team of about seven to watch one executive 24-7.

That's very expensive. They don't come cheap, the good ones, as they shouldn't. Many are retired from the Secret Service and have that type of background or other government agencies.

Diplomatic security is also very big in that game. They're not cheap, but to protect one executive, you will spend a good $5 million a year just in the programs of... getting them around, not counting the equipment like cars and protection of their airplanes and things like that.

So protective details should be your last resort if you're in private security. You don't want to have bodyguards if you can help it because they ain't cheap and they do need training and they can make mistakes. Okay, that's it for the lecture.

We came in about 52 minutes, a little longer than I wanted to go, but about the length of a class, so we'll call it good. Deliverables this week. Do the discussion on personnel security programs.

I want you to try to add in some of the stuff you heard in this lecture or you got from the reading. The reading is the JASCA text, Chapter 5. But I also want to know your opinion. And I want you, in your responses to others, you'll do initial posts by Thursday before midnight, essentially 11.59, and the responses before Sunday at 11.59. If you get them done earlier, happy days.

You can take the rest of the week off and... and relax, do your other work. But I do need to have them done by then. But I want to know your opinion.

And in your responses, try to find somebody who you disagree with. And I want to see how you collegially, oh, I can't even say that, how in a collegial way, you disagree with someone. I see your point, but, you know, I understand where you're coming from.

However, I find that this. And you're going to find that people have different opinions, and I want you to be nice about having different opinions. That's some of the practice in this is being able to disagree with others in a really nice, polite, respectful way and understand that there are a lot of schools of thought on background checks and drug tests especially about whether they're even required, whether they're fair. You know, why should one company do it and not another if they're competitors? It's really kind of an interesting thing.

So. With that, those are your deliverables for this week. Make sure you get those done.

And I will see you in week five in person in the classroom on Monday where we'll start talking about informational security. And we'll do another exercise, if you will, on informational security in week five. And you'll have the chance to do some quick presentations.

Those of you who did not present in week three will have a chance. Some of you will have a chance to do it in week five. when we go out and do another field exercise on informational security.

With that, have a great week, and I will see you on campus next week.

Transcript for:Understanding Personnel Security Measures

Transcript for:
Understanding Personnel Security Measures