Reuters

Is it time for you to move to cash?

Over the years, Alan Haft has had his share of panicked calls from clients who’ve heard the latest media predictions of financial Armageddon.

But this time around, says the Newport Beach, California-based financial adviser, it’s different.

“In the past, some clients have asked me to reduce their exposure to the stock market when there’s lots of bad news floating around,” he says. “But after experiencing what happened in 2008, more of them are telling me they want to dump their stocks altogether and move into cash, especially if they’re close to retirement.”

With mounting debt problems in the U.S. and Europe, the prospect of a double-dip recession, and the huge gains the stock market has seen since 2009, Haft’s clients are not alone in their concerns about a sharp market decline, despite some upticks like today’s.

According to new research from TNS, 87 percent of Americans with $500,000 or more in investable assets agree that the size of the U.S. government’s deficit is a major concern for them, and 43 percent feel the current state of the economy will jeopardize their retirement plans.

Another survey just released by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International indicates that 41 percent of high-net-worth individuals have little or no faith that the U.S. will be able to right itself in this fiscal climate.

Professional investors are worried as well, and some of them view a temporary move to cash equivalents such as money market funds or certificates of deposit as a way to soften the blow of a market fallout.

“In our view it is better to hold cash and deal with the limited real erosion of capital caused by inflation, rather than hold overvalued assets and run the risk of the permanent impairment of capital,” says GMO asset allocation strategist James Montier in a recent report. “The absence of attractively priced assets with good margins of safety should lead investors to raise cash.”

That’s what Madeline Schnapp did in late February and early March when she sold some of her personal stock holdings. At the time, the director of macroeconomic research for TrimTabs Investment Research felt that increased market volatility, the end of QE2 (the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing) and a bubble in silver prices all led to the conclusion that, “It was time to take profits and sit out on the sidelines to see how things shake out. I may miss another run-up but I’m happy with the overall returns these past couple of years and content to reduce risk as volatility picks up.”

While lots of investors may feel the same way, a number of studies show that most of these people are terrible at figuring out when to enter and exit the stock market.

One of the most widely quoted, Dalbar’s annual Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, concludes that regardless of market conditions, mutual fund shareholders who move their money around a lot earn less on their investments, and often a lot less, than those who simply stay put.

The 17-year-old examination of fund flows shows that they consistently abandon money market funds for stock funds after a long market upturn, when prices are already high. They lock in their losses by yanking money from stocks after the market drops and keeping it on the sidelines too long. Since snap-backs are often sharp and sudden, they miss out on a big chunk of rebound returns.

Staying in money market funds for long periods can also mean losing out to inflation. Today, the average money fund is earning a skimpy .03 percent yield, according to Crane Data, while consumer prices are up 3.6 percent over last year. Many of the funds have holdings in troubled European debt, which raises concerns about their stability.

There’s also the problem of taxes. If you own stocks or stock funds in a taxable account, you’ll need to pay short-term or long-term capital gains tax on any amounts attributable to appreciation unless you have enough investment losses to offset them.

For most people, say financial advisers, a good middle ground between doing nothing and diving into cash is trimming back on some stock holdings.

That’s a particularly good option for people who’ve already saved enough for retirement and maintain a frugal lifestyle, says Mary Katherine Dean of Dean Consulting in San Diego. “If you’re already wealthy, you can afford to give up some growth in exchange for peace of mind,” she says. “But if you’re a long way from saving what you need for retirement, you really need to stay in stocks.”

Haft advises some of his clients concerned about a stock market decline to sell a small portion of their equity holdings and move into investments that stand to benefit from a nervous economy and rising interest rates, such as gold or precious metals and floating-rate bonds. For more conservative clients, he recommends equity-indexed certificates of deposit that peg returns to a stock market index but also guarantee return of principal at maturity, or a short-term bonds that mature in less than five years.

Those favoring a more tactical approach can take a cue from value investors who sell stocks they think may be due for a correction and hold the proceeds in cash equivalents for awhile. After a downdraft, they use the stockpile to pick up companies they like at bargain prices. The challenge, of course, is setting an entry point for moving back in after a decline – and having the backbone to follow through on the return.

The Wall Street Journal – The Wealth Report

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/07/06/why-the-rich-fear-violence-in-the-streets/

by Robert Frank

Last year, I was at a billionaire’s home in California and I asked him to describe his biggest worry. He pointed to a 19th century painting on the wall, which depicted a female beggar receiving alms from a wealthy gentleman and giving her patron a flower in return.

“That’s what I worry about,” he said. “But instead of flowers, she’s got guns. Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.”

It turns out he wasn’t alone. A new survey from Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today.

Fully 90% of respondents have a negative view of the current global economic climate and 41% say they have little or no faith that the U.S. will be able to right itself in this fiscal climate.

More than a third said security concerns have negatively affected business or investment plans.

“The survey found a seismic shift in the attitudes of the wealthy and how they are living their lives, the way they travel and how they are running their businesses,” said Christopher Falkenberg, President of Insite Security.

Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features.

Granted, America isn’t a country conducive to class wars in the streets (even a mention by the President of rolling back the private-jet tax breaks sparked denunciations of class warfare). But at a time when most of the country is mired in unemployment, weak housing prices and a stack of bills from the bailouts, the rich have reason to fear public resentment. And some fear even worse.

Do you think there is a risk of violence in the streets against the wealthy either here or abroad?

New York Times

Picking the Brains of the Super-Rich, and Picking Up Tips

By Paul Sullivan

This week, I received five different surveys and analyses purporting to offer insights into the thinking of the rich, the really rich and the super-rich. And those were on top of the dozen or so others so far this year.

The most startling statistic came from the World Wealth Report, the granddaddy of analyses of the rich, conducted by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch. In 2010, the report estimated, a mere 103,000 people of the nearly seven billion people on the planet controlled 36.1 percent of the world’s wealth. (This was up from 35.5 percent in 2009.) North America, the report went on, had the largest number of so-called ultrahigh-net-worth individuals, with 40,000 people worth more than $30 million.

But not all the reports were this revelatory – or scientific. One study, from an online “dating marketplace,” rated cities based on how generous men were in paying for first dates. Denver ranked first for expensive nights out, Cincinnati last.

Then there was the report from Barclays Wealth that found that many high-net-worth individuals wished they had more self-control over their finances.

All of this time and money being put to surveying the rich, particularly at a time when most people are feeling anything but wealthy, prompted me to wonder about the value of this information. Can anything be gleaned from the reports for everyone else? Or are they, at best, sources of trivia? So I sifted through them to see what I could find. Here are some of the highlights.

THE FUN STUFF

The World Wealth Report, released Wednesday, found that last year was not just a good year for the really wealthy. It was also a good year for the merely rich. The number of people with more than $1 million to invest was 10.9 million, up 8.3 percent, while the amount of money they had, $42.7 trillion, had risen by 9.7 percent. (The wealth of this group excludes the value of their primary residences, collectible items and consumable goods.)

“The wealth is growing around the world, but it doesn’t seem that way,” said John W. Thiel, head of United States wealth management and the private banking and investment group at Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management.

One consensus is not surprising – that Asians continue to gain on the rest of the world. A report released in May by the Boston Consulting Group said that the United States still led the world in the number of families worth more than $100 million, 2,692. But it said that China experienced the fastest growth rate, with a one-year jump of 30 percent, to 393 families.

The Merrill report noted that the number of high-net-worth people in Asia, 3.3 million, surpassed the number in Europe, 3.1 million, for the first time. China ranks fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany for the number of high-net-worth citizens.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Global Private Banking and Wealth Management Survey of people who work at wealth management firms, which came out this week as well, predicted that fees from managing money in Asia would grow by about 18 percent in 2011, as against a growth rate of 6 percent in the Americas.

While most reports are pointing to the growing wealth in China, an analysis from Deloitte noted that South Korea was set to join the top 10 list of countries with the most wealthy people by 2020.

ADVICE FOR EVERYONE ELSE

These reports also offered some practical insight for those who are not super-rich.

For one thing, the wealthiest people around the world put more money into equities last year and plan to continue to do so. The World Wealth Report said the wealthy increased their percentage in equities in 2010 to 33 percent, from 29 percent, and the report expected them to increase that to 38 percent by 2012.

The Boston Consulting Group report said people in North America had the highest percentage of their wealth in equities, with 44 percent, up from 41 percent in 2009.

Regardless of what they were investing in, the wealthiest indicated that they were spreading their investments around the world to reduce the risk from political, economic and financial uncertainty. The Institute for Private Investors’ Family Performance Tracking survey, which looks at how its members invest, said the wealthiest people had at least a third of their portfolios outside their home countries. One in five had 50 percent of their money invested internationally.

The wealthy in Latin America had the least amount of their money tied up in their own region, according to the World Wealth Report. Those in North America had the most.

But identifying that safe place is more difficult. The rich generally agreed that they were concerned about the American economy and the potential for political and economic unrest elsewhere.

A study due for release next month from Zogby and Insite Security of people with more than $3 million found that most had a negative view of the global economy and many were worried that the United States would not be able to improve its fiscal situation anytime soon.

And the World Wealth Report found that wealthy Asians were the only ones confident in investing in their own region. The report estimated that Asians would maintain the current percentage of their money invested in the region in 2012, while the wealthy in Europe, North America and Latin America indicated that they planned to reduce their allocations to their own regions.

While there is little that anyone can do about the state of the world, the wealthiest are asking more from their financial advisers, and that is something anyone can emulate.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis found that most investors had less trust and were less loyal to their advisers and were demanding more service than they were a couple of years ago.

“Two years ago, I would have said people would take performance over less than stellar service as long as they’re getting a good return,” said Steven Crosby, the Americas leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers’s private banking and wealth management leadership team. “Now it’s, ‘I want quality service or I’m leaving.’ “

But the World Wealth Report (remember that Merrill Lynch is one of its sponsors) said that advisers had regained client trust. And now is the time, it said, to sell those clients on other products and services that large financial services firms offer, like unique investments through an investment bank and preferred financing for entrepreneurs.

U.S. Trust, meanwhile, which like Merrill Lynch is part of Bank of America, found that many people with at least $3 million had not given any real thought to leaving an inheritance to their children. More worryingly, hardly any entrepreneurs said they had a succession plan in place for their businesses.

That said, Barclays found that the United States ranked fifth out of 20 countries in how satisfied its people were about their financial plans.

Contradictions are inevitable in these various analyses. And all of this attention to the thoughts and strategies of the very rich may seem to be a bit much to some readers. The rich are still getting richer, while everyone else is not. But knowing how the very rich think about their investments and diversification in an uncertain world can be useful to everyone else. Or it could provide some cocktail party tidbits.

Financial Times

Rich pickings as US wealthy fall prey to extortion

By Lauren Foster

On a quiet mid-April evening in 2007, the tranquillity of South Kent, Connecticut, was shattered by intruders bursting into the home of Anne Bass, the wealthy Manhattan socialite.

Brandishing knives and what appeared to be firearms, the masked men entered the sprawling house, bound her hands and those of her partner, Julian Lethbridge, an artist, blindfolded them and injected them with a mysterious blue liquid they were told was a deadly virus. The intruders demanded $8.5m for the antidote, but when Bass refused, they fled in her Jeep Cherokee.

A few days afterwards, the car was found abandoned and an accordion case containing key evidence, including a gun, knife and syringes, washed ashore in Queens, New York. Nearly four years later, Emanuel Nicolescu, Bass’s former butler, was arrested and charged with attempted extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and possession of a stolen vehicle.

The Bass case may read like a made-for-television drama, but it is just one of a number of high-profile – and sometimes bizarre – extortion attempts that have taken place in the US in recent years.

In February, Milton Balkany, a Brooklyn rabbi, was sentenced to four years in prison for trying to extort $4m from SAC Capital Advisors, a private investment firm founded by Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire. And last year, an Emmy Award-winning producer for CBS News was sentenced to six months in jail after attempting to blackmail David Letterman, the television chat-show host, for $2m.

For every extortion case that makes the news, however, countless more go unreported. Not surprisingly, most wealthy victims do not want the publicity; they simply want the problem to go away – quietly. This is when Paul Viollis’s phone starts to ring. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Risk Control Strategies, a consulting and investigation company. “The wealthy have one thing in common,” he says. “They don’t want anyone to know their business.”

He has a straightforward definition of extortion: “do this or else”. He believes it is “a crime of opportunity” and that in recent years, opportunity has abounded. In 2008, for example, RCS handled about seven extortion cases for wealthy clients. In 2009, it was up to 31 and last year the number doubled to 62. In the first quarter of this year alone, RCS oversaw 21 cases.

Viollis attributes the surge to recent events such as the mortgage crisis, the recession and the jump in unemployment. He likes to cite the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as the driving force – in the pursuit of food, water and shelter, “man is capable of doing anything”, he says.

Most of Viollis’s cases are what he calls “event driven”, meaning he gets the call after someone has been threatened with extortion or received a demand. “We bring peace of mind back to our clients.”

Security experts say it is difficult to know if extortion is on the rise in the US, because reliable data are hard to come by. They do say the level of interest in pre-emptive protection is increasing, especially as personal information proliferates on the internet.

“The problem with extortion is that the majority of it goes unreported, and that’s why it’s hard to measure,” says Dorothy Sarna, senior vice-president of risk management services for Chartis, the property and casualty arm of AIG, the insurance group.

While RCS tends to step in as the intermediary once an act of extortion is in progress, other security companies and insurers focus their efforts on preventing the crime from happening in the first place.

“When it comes to risks like extortion, a lot of our clients live in a world of denial; they don’t think that they are vulnerable. Many of them live and work in the US and haven’t been victimised, so this gives them a false sense of security,” says Sarna. “We try to really educate our clients and their advisers, and provide guidance. Heightened access to information in the world today makes everyone more vulnerable to extortion.”

One of the services Chartis offers policyholders who pay $250,000 or more in annual premiums is a complimentary security audit through its partner, Insite Security, a security and risk management company. “It’s just another set of eyes and ears on your security protocol to identity vulnerabilities,” Sarna says.

Christopher Falkenberg, founder of Insite and a former Secret Service agent, says that when it comes to crime, there are two types of risk: standard, where everybody is subject to the same risk, and what he calls “wealthy qua wealthy risk – risk because you are wealthy”. Extortion fits into the latter category.

He thinks of this as “the Willie Sutton problem”, explaining that when the infamous US bank robber was asked why he robbed banks, he reportedly said: “Because that’s where the money is.” (Sutton, however, denied ever saying it.)

There are two areas in particular where lax security can lead to problems: information security – everything from a person’s media profile and information posted on social media sites to travel details – and employees.

Dick Hildreth is a managing director at Kroll Risk & Compliance Solutions, a risk mitigation company, where he leads the kidnap, ransom and extortion services. He says Kroll gets calls in two extortion scenarios: from clients who want advice on how to avoid putting themselves in danger and from those who have already received a threat and want help resolving the situation.

When it comes to pre-emptive security, Kroll first creates a profile that looks at questions such as: is the victim considered to be an at-risk target based on his or her wealth or perceived wealth? Is the individual or family well known? Is the company he or she owns in the public eye? Has he or she had extensive media coverage?

“We develop a profile on each individual, prepare a risk assessment and make recommendations to enhance their security – everything from advice on security procedures, including the selection of a security director for their company, to the use of corporate aircraft and the implementation of strict travel protocols,” says Hildreth, who was an agent with the FBI. “The biggest thing is to increase their own awareness so that anytime something suspicious happens – a phone call, a car in the neighbourhood – they report it immediately rather than overlook it as a potential threat.”

A significant red flag for potential extortion, says Hildreth, is whether the person or family is constantly in the news.

He also notes that it is increasingly important for wealthy individuals to make sure their children understand the risks that come with the family’s wealth so that they don’t become targets of extortion by inadvertently placing themselves in compromising positions, especially when they leave home to go to university or to travel.

Regarding private staff, Sarna of Chartis says employees and their friends are “probably the most common areas of extortion”, and that regular background checks are essential.

“People get complacent. They have had the employee with their family for many years, and the person has always been trustworthy. But you have to continue to look at it as an employer-employee relationship – they are not family members. That will make you vulnerable,” she says. “Unfortunately the economic downturn has been a factor. Some people are a little more desperate and their financial situation causes them to act in ways they wouldn’t have four or five years ago.”

Many wealthy individuals simply assume that the people working on their property are trustworthy because the company they represent has had a long history with the family. Falkenberg of Insite provides an example: he recently had a meeting in the upmarket town of Greenwich, Connecticut. While he was sitting in the home of the prospective client, he noticed someone outside raking the leaves. He asked who the person was, but was told: “That’s one of Joe’s guys. I’ve known Joe for years. It’s not a problem; Joe’s great.” Falkenberg told the prospective client: “There’s a man 10 feet away from where we are sitting. He probably knows everything about your family. I realise he’s an employee of Joe, but who is he?’ She looked at me and had no idea.”

A thorough background investigation can go a long way. Viollis says several extortion cases he has helped resolve have involved personal staff. In one instance, a “major player on Wall Street” sought his help when his Czech housekeeper – who had not been subjected to a background check – said she was returning to Prague, but before doing so, she wanted a million dollars in exchange for not telling his wife that he had been forcing himself on her. (Viollis says the client denied this. His account of the facts could not be independently verified.)

“This man equated the money to a bar tab – give her a million and it’ll go away,” Viollis says. “But that’s not the case; they never go away.”

So he did what he apparently does best. Leaning in from across the desk, he says matter-of-factly: “I sat down with her and said, ‘Think of me as the ghost of Christmas future. Let me tell you what your future looks like. If you follow through with this, you will be committing extortion. His wife may or may not divorce him, but either way, he’ll survive. You, on the other hand, will be a different story. I will personally assist my client in contacting the proper law enforcement authorities to make sure you are locked up right away. So you can walk away now without breaking the law or get used to the comforts of a small cell. Your call. Go home or go to jail.”

She went home to Prague.

New York Times

Negative Online Data Can Be Challenged, at a Pric

By PAUL SULLIVAN

THE Web is like an elephant – it never forgets, and if let loose it can cause a lot of trouble.

I couldn’t help being reminded of this when I heard about the women who had received Representative Anthony Weiner’s lewd photos. Even though the women appear to have done nothing wrong, their names are likely to be forever linked to Mr. Weiner in an online search. Most people do not generate enough positive mentions to push the negative ones lower in search engine rankings.

“These are people who are collaterally damaged,” said Michael Fertik, chief executive and founder of Reputation.com, which helps people control their online identities. “The blogosphere is interested in you, but three days later it’s over and you’re forgotten forever. But you’re branded as that person.”

This would not have been the case a decade or two ago, when most embarrassing incidents simply died away. Or if they did not, people could simply move elsewhere and reinvent themselves. The Web has changed that.

The Weiner episode is highly visible, of course. But the risk is out there for people involved in far less publicized incidents. About a year ago I interviewed someone for a column about real estate choices. But when I searched his name in Google, the first mention was an arrest for driving under the influence. I asked him about this, and he said he felt it had contributed to his inability to find a job for more than a year.

Then there are children graduating from high school this month and heading to college far from their parents’ watchful eyes. They have the ability to both damage their own reputations and expose their parents to lawsuits if they damage other people’s reputations.
The extreme example of this is Dharun Ravi, the former Rutgers University student accused of using a webcam to spy on his roommate’s intimate encounter with another man. The roommate committed suicide several days later. Mr. Ravi is now facing criminal charges in the case. Whatever the outcome of the trial, Mr. Ravi’s online reputation will be forever affected.

“What we see when kids do something stupid is the target of the attacks going after the parents,” said Peter Piotrowski, senior vice president for claims in the private client division of Chartis.

Even though children are living at college, their primary residence is assumed to be their family home. The lawyer for the person suing can claim that the parents should have been better monitors of their children’s Internet activity, Mr. Piotrowski said.

If your reputation is damaged, the economic consequences can be substantial. But there are steps people can take to alter their online reputation and protect themselves against lawsuits for defamation and libel. What follows is a discussion of the options.

DAMAGED REPUTATION The speed at which someone’s reputation can be damaged, even with false information, makes combating defamatory remarks tough.

The college student who received Mr Weiner’s picture said that she had awakened to find her name all over the Internet. Reversing that kind of damage takes time.

“I used to say until about two to three years ago that there are a lot of things you can do to solve these problems yourself,” Mr. Fertik saiD. “I stopped saying that. It’s become so technically complicated to solve this.”

Technology companies are not the only resource for cleaning up a reputation. Security and investigative firms can also help.

Christopher Falkenberg, president of Insite Security, said his firm had resorted to face-to-face meetings with people who posted damaging information as well as the search engine companies that linked to it.

Sometimes, of course, the damaging information is true, or the site refuses to remove the information. Then, firms like Reputation.com and security consultants resort to burying the information as best they can. “You hope people won’t go to the third or fourth page,” Mr. Falkenberg said.

Yet doing any of this costs a lot of money. Reputation.com advertises an annual membership fee of $99, but Mr. Fertik said that costs could easily reach $10,000 for a prominent person who wanted to make a scandal harder to discover through Internet searches. He said Mr. Weiner was probably out of luck: “It would take a long time and more money than he has.”

For the detective work, the costs escalate quickly. Michael J. Hershman, president of the Fairfax Group, a risk and reputation management firm, said burying negative information could cost $500 to $1,000 but persuading search engines to expunge incorrect information could cost several thousand dollars more. Getting that information removed from aggregating Web sites like Intellius or PeopleFinder can add another couple of thousand dollars.

Costs can spike into five figures when a firm is asked to find the people responsible for the defamatory blog post or Twitter message. “If you’re going to hire a firm like ours to find that person, it’s hit or miss,” Mr. Hershman said. “We can’t guarantee success. It’s not as easy as going to the search engines.”

SUED FOR DAMAGE Then there are the costs for someone accused of damaging another person’s reputation. Lawsuits for defamation and libel are expensive to defend and expensive to settle.

The singer Courtney Love, for instance, recently paid a fashion designer $430,000 to settle a lawsuit brought after Ms. Love sent out a defamatory Twitter post about the woman’s work.

High-end firms like Chubb and Chartis offer coverage against such suits in their personal injury category – as opposed to bodily injury, which almost all homeowner policies have. But if, for example, a parent or child defames someone, the costs could quickly exceed the coverage in a basic policy.

Mr. Piotrowski said Chartis recently paid out $75,000 to cover the legal fees of a client who had forwarded an e-email that defamed a nonpublic person in town. “She forwarded this e-mail onto her own circle of friends and it got forwarded on and on,” he said. “She did nothing to modify it or put any commentary on it.”

It probably would have been smarter if the woman had not forwarded the e-mail, but she was fortunate to have the insurance to cover her legal costs and more fortunate still to have the case dismissed.

Many people might not be this lucky. Jeanne Salvatore, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, said people might not know if they had coverage against defamation in their homeowner’s policy. One solution is an umbrella policy that offers coverage for libel and defamation (as well as coverage above and beyond existing policies), she said.

The cost of an umbrella policy is often quite low for the amount of coverage. Kevin Desmond, personal lines manager for northern New England at Chubb, said it could be as low as $350 a year for $5 million of coverage.

“The threat was always when kids reached driving age, they became scary individuals,” he said. “Today, from their bedroom they have access to their world. Their parents may not really realize their kids can have an impact on them.”

(The cost of excess liability insurance increases based not on the likelihood that you will defame someone but on how many homes, boats and cars you have. Chartis said a $5 million umbrella policy for someone with two homes, four cars and a $1 million in coverage for underinsured drivers would be $1,288 a year.)

Unlike the situation a generation ago, dings to people’s reputations can follow them through life. “It’s a shame that if you’re a professional person and you’ve spent your lifetime learning something, the Internet doesn’t know that about you,” Mr. Fertik said. “It just knows that you gave a quote about the cafeteria food at your college and ran a marathon”

For some people, being known for that would be just fine.

Security Management Magazine

Planning for Tumultuous Times

By Matthew Harwood

When employees are caught in a crisis like the Egyptian political upheaval or Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, a company has to be able to quickly communicate with them and help them get safely out of the danger zone.“I think we need help.”

That simple statement is typically the first communication received by those staffing International SOS’s crisis response center hotline whenever a calamity strikes and companies fear they have employees in danger. Whether it’s political upheaval, such as this winter’s widespread uprisings across the Middle East, or nature wreaking havoc, as it did in Japan’s devastating one-two earthquake-tsunami punch, the ability to respond quickly is key to being able to safely extract personnel from hot spots. Invariably, however, valuable time is lost, because companies aren’t prepared to quickly communicate with employees in danger zones. “The communications part is far and away the most important component to every mission that we run,” says Dan Richards, CEO of Global Rescue, a Boston-based crisis response company.

When response center staff members get that first call for help, they ask: “How many people do you have in the crisis?” “Who are they?” “What is their manifest information?” “Ninety-nine percent of the time, the companies respond by saying: “I don’t know, but I’ll go back and find out,” says Alex Puig, a regional security director for Travel Security Services, a joint venture of International SOS and Control Risks. Often days go by before those companies call International SOS to provide the information needed to help locate their people and get them out of a bad situation. Terrible things can happen during that space of time. In a crisis, “Speed is life,” says Puigg, “The sooner you can identify who you have at risk out there, the quicker you can mitigate [the threat].”

The key is a good crisis communications program. That can be achieved by leveraging the appropriate technology, providing staff with the necessary training to use it well, and backing it up with a proper crisis management plan. With those components, you can be “ahead of the curve, so when the smoke starts billowing, you immediately turn and say, ‘This is who we have right now, let’s communicate with them, and get them right out,” says Puig.

Here’s how a company gets to that point.

Technology

The center of any crisis management response is communications technology. Companies need to understand their options and what might work best in a given situation.

Smartphones. In today’s world of split-second communications, the most valuable device is the one found in nearly every businessperson’s pocket. Simply put: the smartphone has revolutionized crisis communications. As long as employees’ BlackBerrys or iPhones can receive a cellular signal or snag a WiFi connection, a company or its security provider can call, text message, or e-mail its travelers and inform them immediately of danger roiling around them.

Smartphones also help companies address one of the most important concerns of crisis communications: how to provide redundancy so that staff have alternative means of getting messages in or out if the first option fails. With smartphones, if the cell-phone voice lines are jammed, travelers may still be able to send and receive text messages or e-mails, which take up less bandwidth. And they may still have access to WiFi even if cell lines are down or overwhelmed.

Smartphones’ data capabilities allow travelers to receive detailed travel warnings and other security-related information in real time from their company or its crisis response contractor. Knowing that the political situation in Bahrain has turned sour before boarding the connecting flight into Bahrain International Airport could be a lifesaver, for example.

GPS technology embedded within smartphones can help companies locate employees as well. For precise tracking coupled with a crisis response center, it may be necessary to purchase software designed for the purpose, says Matthew Freedman, CEO of Indigo Telecom USA, a satellite-based telecommunications provider, which has a software product, called SpaceGuard, that does just that.

SpaceGuard is a Web-based solution that has a client component that can be downloaded onto smartphones and satellite phones for $25 a day per device. In dangerous countries, Freedman recommends that users run the software on both devices. Once installed, the program leverages GPS signals to send location data to response centers via General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Short Message Service (SMS).

The location information sent includes four kinds of data: longitude and latitude coordinates, time and date, cell tower information, and the device’s battery levels. For added redundancy, the cell tower information can be used to triangulate a person’s approximate location, although it’s less reliable than GPS coordinates, which can pinpoint a person’s location within meters. Cell-tower tracking is only as good as the number of cell towers in the area, which are vulnerable to natural disasters or attacks by militants in places like Afghanistan, says Freedman. The location information is relayed to a crisis response center where it can be overlaid on a map and cross-referenced with intelligence data to determine whether a traveler is in a risky area.

The system can also set up geo-fences to immediately alert users that they’ve entered a dangerous area or left a safe zone. In addition, companies and travelers can choose between either active or passive tracking. During active tracking, which might be used in danger zones, the software transmits its data according to predetermined intervals, such as every ten minutes or every two hours. When the software is set to passive tracking, location data is sent to a response center every 24 hours, whether managed by Indigo or the client company.

But the core part of Indigo’s system isn’t really the tracking, rather it is the ability to get the information to a crisis response center via a data package, text, or voice so that companies can implement their crisis plans. Because the service is Web-based, its data can be accessed from any Internet connection. Thus, small companies can opt to have a virtual response center anywhere, with nothing more than one person sitting behind a laptop that accesses the information, while big enterprises with many employees can have a large security provider or in-house team using it in a crisis command center.

Users also have the option of pushing an SOS button on the device if a situation turns hellish in a flash. When pushed, the SOS application sends the response center the user’s precise current location immediately, along with the coordinates for the previous 24 hours.

The tracking and SOS features help companies fulfill their duty-of-care obligations while reducing their insurance costs. (Freedman is currently in discussions with insurance companies to tie Indigo’s SpaceGuard together with lower insurance quotes for companies sending employees into high-risk locations.) This type of service can be especially critical for such companies as defense contractors, media organizations, and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that send their people into high-risk, potentially lethal situations.

Not all C-suites recognize the tremendous power that smartphones put into their hands. “They’re thinking that a smartphone is just for e-mail,” says John Schafer, crisis response consultant at Neil Young and Associates International. What they don’t realize, he says, is that smartphones integrated with GPS, mapping, and other applications become a crisis management system that can leverage multiple technologies and multiple information systems to gain instant situational awareness.

“Technology enables us to take the most recent information and put it in the hands of people on the ground so they can make individual decisions by themselves when trained properly,” Schafer explains.

Satellite phones. The one caveat with relying on cellular-based smartphone communications is that they can fail or be disrupted. Thus, companies need alternatives that can serve as emergency backup communications devices. Crisis experts recommend a satellite phone, or sat phone, which also provides users multiple modes of communication such as voice, text, and e-mail.” “[T]hey’re the only communication method that won’t be shut down by terrestrial disturbances,” says Christopher Falkenberg, president of Insite Security. When an earthquake or a tsunami hits, cell towers break, while satellites orbit safely in space.

Global Rescue’s Richards agrees. “When we deploy, we take sat phones…so we’re not reliant on the indigenous communications infrastructure,” he says. Richards adds that sat phones proved to be a useful alternative in Egypt when the government blocked cell phone communications at the start of the popular uprising that eventually toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

But satellite phones are not impervious to interruption by hostile regimes. Some countries, like Libya, have been known to block their transmissions, and both Libya and Cuba make it illegal to own a sat phone.

There can be natural interference with satellite signals as well. Heavy forests, for example, can present connectivity problems for sat phones as can dense urban areas. “What you need is a clear line of sight to the sky,” Richards says.

Internet. Though Mubarak blocked the Internet as well as cellular communications, an Internet connection can be a life saver when other options have been taken offline. This was the case in Haiti when the earthquake hit in 2009.

“We were actually able to adequately communicate with a lot of people via Skype, because that was a technology working when cell [towers] were destroyed in the earthquake,” says John Rose, president of Business Travel Services for Travel Guard. Also in the case of Haiti, some clients preferred that Travel Guard communicate via Facebook, a communication method the company isn’t that comfortable with because of security concerns, but it accommodated the customer’s requests.

“At this time, Facebook and Twitter [are] not a mode of communication that allows us to put secure data out there about what’s going on in a region,” says Rose. “It’s very hard to crack into a cell phone signal…It’s very easy for someone to track what someone’s doing on Facebook.” But when cell towers are down, Facebook at least provides a way to get a message across to otherwise stranded personnel if they have an Internet connection.

Another issue with Facebook, however, is that it’s not a real-time two-way conversation. Richards explains that Global Rescue prefers voice communication because they can then receive real-time feedback from a client, which allows his crisis response team to give advice based on what’s happening around the client at that moment.

Rose concurs. Talking directly is also best for the client’s peace of mind, he notes. “We want to call them, calm them down, explain what’s going on, what’s going to happen, and what the plan of action is,” says Rose. With voice, it may also be possible for the crisis-response service provider to connect the stranded employee with family or with a familiar company contact.

Power. The revolution in communications and information technology continues to decrease the likelihood that people will ever be completely cut off. All of these technological options do, however, have one common vulnerability that all crisis response professionals highlighted: the devices that enable them require some form of power to operate. Travelers should always make sure their communications devices have a full charge each day. It’s advisable to keep fully charged backup batteries on hand as well for when charging is not possible.

Planning and Programs

Crisis response professionals hammer home the message that companies must do more than buy equipment or contract for services. Unfortunately, many companies have a consumerist attitude to crisis management. They “write a check and say, ‘If there’s a problem, we’ll call you,” says Global Rescue’s Richards. “Those clients frankly are not going to be as successful in a disaster or crisis-type situation as companies that take these threats seriously.”

Companies don’t have to go it alone. Travel Guard and other service providers can work with them to draw up their crisis management employee rescue plans and then communicate them to staff. At a minimum, they say, the plan for extracting employees from remote danger zones should address the following: Knowing where employees are and training them to know what to do. Good intelligence collection and dissemination are also important, as is having a crisis team that can spearhead decision-making efforts if an incident arises.

Where they are. When natural disasters occur, as they did in Haiti and Japan, or when political tensions erupt into violence, as in the Middle East, companies shouldn’t be scrambling to find out where their employees are and how to contact them. They should have a system that can ensure they’ll have that information at hand. And that takes more than the technology already discussed.

“It all starts with your ability in a very timely manner to identify your travelers, know where they’re going, know when they’re going, and know how long they’re going to be there and when they’re going to return,” says Puig.

Most companies won’t opt for services like Indigo’s that can track in real-time, however, because of the cost and perceived level of need. They will instead rely on travel management companies (TMCs) to have a database with each employee’s travel plans. In this case, companies should work with their TMC to ensure that they get detailed itineraries from their employees.

They should make sure to track all travel, not just air, says Rose. “You may fly into one area and catch local transportation to [another location] two, three, four hours away; so you’re nowhere near where they think you are.”

If possible, employees should also be required to list the types of daily local ground transportation they plan to use should a terrorist attack target transportation facilities, as it did during the London Tube bombings in 2005; that information could help crisis response providers assess whether a company’s employees were likely to be there.

Hotels should also be listed. The reason lodging information is a critical piece of information within any crisis management plan was illustrated by events in Egypt. When Mubarak’s regime shut down the country’s communications infrastructure, Puig says, International SOS resorted to calling the land lines of places the clients said they were staying. When cellular and Internet networks go down, and a person doesn’t have a satellite phone, the landline is the fallback position, he says.

International SOS staff members were frequently successful in reaching stranded employees of client companies by calling landlines at dorms, office buildings, and hotels. Once they had their client on the phone, International SOS could prepare them for evacuation.

Training. Communications technologies are only as good as the people using them. Before a company dispatches employees into an unfamiliar place that could turn dangerous with little warning, management should make sure they know, for example, the difference between a smartphone and a sat phone and when one’s preferable over the other.

“Every time you implement technology, you have to implement a training system and a policy behind the technology to make sure everybody knows how to use that as well,” Schafer says.

Companies also need to arm employees with vital information, such as whom to contact if things start to go south. That way, even if the company can’t locate the employee, at least it can be assured that person knows how to reach out to the crisis response provider.

Rose says that every company should require traveling employees to have its crisis response provider’s contact information in as many places as possible, including their wallet or purse, phone, and laptop. That makes it more likely they’ll have the contact information at hand when it is needed.

Staff also need basic training in how to detect early signs of trouble so that they can get out before it’s too late. Training should teach staff how to identify what is dangerous and what to do.

Intelligence. Companies can help employees with intelligence. One source of that type of information is the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), which companies can join, says its Executive Director Peter Ford. OSAC, which was set up in 1985, is a joint public-private partnership between the State Department and American organizations operating overseas; it allows the government and participating organizations to share security-related information.

To better facilitate quick information sharing on a local level, OSAC has created more than 140 country councils. “It gives you the latest on-the-ground information,” says Ford. Through the councils, members can get together and discuss the intelligence. In Libya, the country council met two weeks before the actual evacuation to start making contingency plans for that possibility. These types of resources can be incredibly valuable to smaller companies that can’t afford security directors or staff, says Ford. They can leverage the security intelligence and knowledge of larger organizations through OSAC.

Teams. Companies must also designate and train crisis management teams. Too often, a company thinks it has checked off this task box when what it has is just a roster of company names and their contact information, say crisis response providers. “I’ve been on the phone with so many customers that are struggling to even make a decision…because they don’t have a properly trained crisis management team,” says Puig. “It becomes a yelling match to see who has the best idea and who yells the loudest is perhaps who wins.”

Crisis teams must get appropriate training, including scenario-based exercises. They must be ready to adapt to a range of situations, and they must have the authority they will need to be effective.

Natural disasters like the Haitian earthquake, the volcanic eruption over Iceland, and the Japanese tsunami as well as man-made crises such as the political unrest across the Middle East demonstrate how a crisis situation can strike anytime, anywhere. Companies that prepare have a greater chance of getting employees out of danger zones safely. Those that don’t will face legal liability, lost productivity, and worst of all, harm or death to their most important asset-their people.

“The best mitigation for crisis is preparation,” says Schafer. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Barron’s

Protect Yourself Against Kidnapping

By LARRY LIGHT

Consultants offer good advice on heading off your worst nightmare. Time for insurance?

When Gert Boyle, the octogenarian chairman of Columbia Sportswear Co., returned home last November, she found a gunman waiting in the driveway. The thug forced her into her house outside Portland, Ore., and roughed her up, the first part of a plan to kidnap the woman whose ads call her “one tough mother.” She foiled her captor, who allegedly wanted $20,000 in ransom, by triggering her home’s silent alarm, alerting police.

The threat of kidnapping, especially involving wealthy people and their children, has increased markedly as a result of the global economic turmoil, experts say. Plus, the rising number of multimillionaires is heady enticement for criminals. The dangers are only heightened by how freely the rich travel around the world for business and pleasure.

Although statistics are sparse on abductions nationally and globally, instances of the crime are “as high as we have ever seen,” says Thomas Livergood, chief executive of the Family Wealth Alliance, a consulting firm catering to the well-off. “A lot is unreported because no one wants to invite repeat abductions.”

The problem is particularly acute in trouble-ridden nations like Mexico, whose government reports a quadrupling in kidnappings over the past five years. Traveling there and to certain other spots is now seen as more hazardous than ever for the well-to-do. “When you see businessmen in jeans and T-shirts in Brazil,” Livergood says, “this tells you something.”

Consultants and other outfits serving the rich have begun providing a slew of practical tips on how to stay safe in a dangerous world. It can be as simple as using the right kind of luggage tag and as elaborate as buying a multimillion-dollar insurance policy against ransom.

The increased sensitivity to security is evident throughout the wealth-management world. At the high-end hotels where the Institute for Private Investors holds gatherings, outside callers are never told who is present, and therefore away from their homes, says Charlotte Beyer, chief executive of the networking group for the rich.

“The kidnap threat is always there,” Beyer says. “The fear is that anyone can Google a last name and find out that the person’s kid goes to Rye Country Day school,” and then use that information to snatch the child for ransom.

Kidnapping in emerging countries is a lucrative and highly organized business — with the perverse result that your odds of survival are better if you are nabbed there. “The victim is in more physical danger in the U.S.,” where kidnappers tend to be first-timers and amateurs, says Christopher Voss, head of the kidnap section at Insite Security, which serves corporations and wealthy families. In the U.S., Voss says, the odds are greater that the captors will get caught, so they are more eager to silence their victims and thwart later identification to the police.

“They’ll stick you in a hole in the ground without food or water, and leave you,” he says. “The level of desperation is higher among American kidnappers.”

THE CLASSIC LEFT-TO-DIE STORY is that of Harvey Weinstein, a formal-wear manufacturer (and not the film producer of the same name). For 12 days in 1993, he was buried alive in a barrel-shaped crypt in Manhattan near the Henry Hudson Parkway. The container imprisoning him had a steel door weighed down by cinderblocks so he couldn’t break out. Police arrested one of the five kidnappers after he picked up $3 million in ransom, loaded in duffel bags in stacks of $50 and $100 bills. Suspects tipped off the police where to find Weinstein who, once dug out, said, “Thank God you’re here. I’d like to have a cigarette.” He died in 2007 at age 82.

But in emerging nations, the chance of getting arrested is very small for abductors. They tend to operate in professional, organized gangs and often are in cahoots with the cops, who are bribed to look the other way. The gangs regard kidnapping as a volume business, and have no need to kill a victim once they are paid. These gangsters “take the time to recruit the right people and figure out the costs involved to get the payout,” says Paul Viollis, chief executive of Risk Control Strategies, a consulting and crisis-management concern.

Favorite targets are college students on spring break. “They’ll demand the parents wire $10,000 or $20,000 to a Caymans account. For the kidnappers, it is minimum risk and maximum reward,” Viollis says. Other common prey is the adult traveler who may order a car from a hotel desk clerk working with the gangs. The clerk, who functions as a scout and researches the guest list for the best marks, knows all about the visitor. Once the car arrives, of course, it will not go where the traveler asks to be taken.

In such situations, going to the U.S. Embassy or the police is usually fruitless, Viollis says. The diplomats, who have no investigative capability, will go to the police. “The result is the same. The cops are corrupt. They won’t help.” In spite of the more business-like methods in foreign nations, being a captive is still harrowing. Victims are routinely beaten to show them who is boss and discourage attempts to flee.

KIDNAP INSURANCE IS GOING STRONG, offered by companies like Chubb Group, Hiscox Ltd. and Ace Group, to wealthy families and corporate employees. This is a niche business, cloaked in secrecy. Insurance companies do not break out returns or other data about their kidnap units. Clients “don’t want it out that they even have” this coverage, says Marie Heinrichs, senior vice president at insurance broker DeWitt Stern Group. Making that public, she says, would entice kidnappers. On the insurer’s rolls, the policyholder often is listed as a limited liability corporation. The existence of a policy, she says, “is kept secret from a lot of the people who work in a family office, for fear someone will leak the information.”

The insurance ranges from $1 million to $10 million and covers ransom, hostage negotiators, travel for family members, medical care for hostages after release and sometimes advice to lower the risk of abduction in the first place. A common yearly premium for a $1 million policy is $2,500, Ms. Heinrichs says.

A chief benefit is the instant availability of a kidnap expert right after an abduction. The expert’s advice “in the early hours of a case may very well save the individual’s life,” says James Bronner, a senior vice president at Chubb, which uses Ackerman Group security consultants for such jobs.

This is an expanding business, with security-consulting firms beefing up their kidnapping services for wealthy people and corporations. Livergood’s group has started a security arm, called the Alliance Security Council, specializing in family offices. A big focus for them is offering preventive advice, designed to keep would-be abductors at bay.

That outfit and other consultants offer plenty of advice about traveling abroad, such as where to find reliable drivers who are not in league with kidnappers. They show you how to avoid looking like a rich tourist – keep the expensive jewelry at home, don’t flash your cash and try not to be a loudmouth. They advise against luggage tags with your name and address visible; ones with a cover that obscures that information are best. And they will tell you to curb your youngsters’ gabbing on social media, a rich source of clues about your family’s travel plans and present whereabouts.

AMONG THE MOST BASIC PIECES of advice is to vary your routine. Weinstein, the clothing executive, had breakfast every morning at a diner on Northern Boulevard in the New York borough of Queens, near his company’s factory. As he walked through the parking lot, two men forced him into a car. One of the kidnappers later was identified as an employee at Weinstein’s company, where the man sewed pants.

Knowing who the hired help are, especially those working around the home, is an important defensive technique. Ace, the insurer, had a case where a handyman, who had worked on a family’s roof, kidnapped their 14-year-old daughter and held her for several months. In another instance, a Montana painting contractor plotted to abduct the 14-year-old son of a famous (and unidentified) comedian in Montana, according to Ace. Police thwarted the scheme and arrested the painter before he could snatch the boy. No one had done a background check to find that the foiled kidnapper was a convicted felon.

Insite’s Voss requires that landscapers working on a property provide backgrounds on the workers, and the security firm takes photos of them. “These guys are working 10 feet outside your living room window, so they know what your kids look like and their schedules,” he says.

Since kidnapping details often are hushed up, it’s hard to calculate the average ransom. One thing is certain: Kidnapping leaves emotional scars or worse on its survivors.

Columbia Sportswear’s Ms. Boyle, whose quick thinking foiled her abductor by bringing the police very quickly, was shattered by the ordeal. The crook pressed a gun to her head and threatened to shoot her, shoved her against a wall and then to the floor, tied up her up and gagged her, her court-filed statement said. When the police came to the door, the kidnapper told her not to divulge his presence or he would kill her. “I was so afraid for my life that I wet my pants out of fear,” the statement said.

Despite her feisty image, the 87-year-old executive wrote that she can no longer live in her home of 24 years and doesn’t feel safe driving alone. Once a stalwart public representative of the Columbia brand, she now has eliminated most personal appearances and travel.

Certainly, the wealthy have long been targets for criminals out to make a big score. Italian kidnappers bagged $2.8 million in ransom for the 1973 release of J. Paul Getty III, the oil heir, who died in February at age 54 after years battling drug addiction believed related to the traumatizing captivity. His captors cut off his ear as proof they had him. More recently, in 2003, four men grabbed hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert from his company’s parking lot. They wanted $40,000 in cash. Arrests and convictions followed the Boyle, Getty and Lampert cases.

The super-wealthy may well have bodyguards, who can charge $1 million yearly for 24/7 coverage. Most high-net-worth types, though, are blissfully ignorant of the threat. “Very few have the proper security,” says Scott Alswang, senior vice president at SOS Security. “It means nothing to them until it hits the fan.”

The better course: Take the smart steps and avoid that fan entirely.

Fox Business

The Royal Wedding: Costing a King’s Ransom?

Britons may be rejoicing over a day off work to celebrate the nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, but the extra free time may come at a cost; taxpayers will be picking up part of the tab for the lavish affair.

Officials won’t confirm the cost of the wedding until it’s over, but many reports are estimating the events to cost between $16 and $64 million.

“Honestly, it may sound like a lot, but William and Kate have actually decided to tone things down and take things down a notch,” says Amy Eisinger, assistant editor of TheKnot.com and TheWeddingChannel.com. “We know that Charles and Diana’s wedding cost $48 million, so when you think about that, these guys have really made an effort to simplify things.”

Because it is not a state occasion, some of the wedding funds will come from Queen Elizabeth II’s personal holdings as well as from Prince Charles and the bride’s family.

“British taxpayers will shoulder a lot of the burden, but some of it is coming from the family, and we have no way of knowing what may have been donated or gifted to the couple as an early wedding present,” says Eisinger. “Kate’s parents are estimated to spend around 100,000 GBP of their own money, and it’s really incredible that they’re spending anything. It’s an interesting reflection of the current British economy.”

One cost that is expected to be shouldered by British people is the security for the royals and dignitaries on site-and it doesn’t come cheap.

Estimated costs for security detail at the nuptials range between $8 and $32 million, according to TheKnot.com and TheWeddingChannel.com.

“If what happens in the U.S. is in any indication of what happens in U.K., the biggest security expense will be overtime,” says Chris Falkenberg, founder and president of Insite Security, one of the largest private security firms in the U.S. “They are going to deploy hundreds of policemen and members of law enforcement, most of whom will work far more than an eight-hour day for several days in a row.”

The country is on its second highest threat level for the big day-meaning an attack is considered “highly likely.”

Other security expenses that will easily rack up include things like barricades around the perimeter of the ceremony location, Westminster Abbey, metal detectors that all guests and employees must pass through, helicopters for airborne surveillance, and security guards for important guests.

“Of course there will be security at an event like this, but the royal family will be willing to pay for the best security money can buy because it takes incredible coordination,” says Falkenberg. “If each member of the royal family has four bodyguards, and there are six people in a room, you can’t have 24 bodyguards standing around. There are a lot of moving parts, and they will hire people who have experience with foreign dignitaries.”

Providing the Royal Spotlight

No one on site the day of the wedding will be immune from security detail, says Falkenberg, and every vendor should expect to be inspected.

Bentley Meeker, president of Bentley Meeker Lighting and Staging, who has provided lightening for blockbuster weddings including Katherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, but is not working the royal wedding, says before his crew can set up, they must have all their equipment swept for bombs-which can carry a hefty price tag.

“This isn’t just a wedding. It’s a coming out party for modern Britain,” says Meeker. “I can only imagine they’ve put a significant focus on lighting, and that will easily cost around half of their decorating budget.”

If a couple plans to spend $500,000 on floral arrangements, its typical for them to spend $100,000 to $200,000 on lighting, according to Meeker. Most professional lighting companies command such a high price because they are completely self contained, bringing with them their own generators, electrical grids, and everything needed to set up. Because everything needs to be brought in from the outside, a lighting staff-which Meeker says for an event of royal wedding proportions could total more than 100 people-usually begins setting up five to seven days in advance of the event.

Multiple Venues

The celebration doesn’t stop after the couple weds in front of an expected crowd of 1,900 at Westminster Abbey at 6:00 a.m. EDT. They then move to Buckingham Palace for the champagne toast and dinner.

If the type of decorations present for Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding is any indication, attendees can expect each venue to be decked out with flowers, which will probably cost between $400,000 and $600,000, according to TheKnot.com.

“I think when all is told, they’re probably going to spend about $1 million on flowers when you factor in the cost of design, labor, transportation, vases, and maintenance day of,” says Richard Meyer, creative director of international floral design boutique Noir Hanna in New York who has experience designing arrangements for star-studded events. “I heard they were going to use some cut flowers from Windsor Great Park, but even if they do that, they’ll have to pay someone to cut them and arrange them.”

The total amount of individual stems used in the arrangements for the Royal Wedding will likely total around 100,000, according to Meyer, who says to expect vibrant colors and flowers that look a little more “youthful,” than what we may have seen at previous regal ceremonies.

But paying for vibrant, healthy stems is just one part of the floral expense. The staff chosen to arrange and place the flowers will be the best at what they do, and will command a high salary, says Meyer.

“To decorate without destroying anything is always a challenge,” says Meyer. “It’s going to be worth it to the royal family to pay for someone who isn’t going to ruin the pews with water or have leaves strewn around on the floor.”

Yet even if the royal family and the British taxpayers are paying top dollar to ensure that every element of the wedding goes off without a hitch it’s still worth it in the end to the English economy, according to Eisinger.

“When all is said and done, it’s going to be a welcome boost to British economy, even though people are complaining. They’re going to make money on souvenirs, commemorative videos, the iTunes soundtrack of the wedding, and replicas of Kate’s dress. The list goes on,” says Eisinger. “It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

Peter Greenberg Worldwide

Analyzing Post-9/11 Travel Safety And Security: Airports, Trains, International Hotels And Beyond

Concerns over our safety and security are always lingering, no matter where, when or how we travel.

But is America any safer since the attacks on 9/11?

In a series of Web interviews, Peter sits down with Christopher Falkenberg, former Special Agent of the United States Secret Service, attorney, and founder of Insite Security, to go over some of the most pressing issues facing American travelers today.

Find out why experts are still concerned about terrorism in the air, why international hotels are seen as soft targets, and the ongoing security holes in our rail and port systems.

For more information on Chris Falkenberg and Insite Security, visit www.insitesecurity.com.

1. Are We Any Safer Since 9/11?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2zEkX93NHU&feature=player_embedded

2. Cargo Inspections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJoZE5RulfY&feature=player_embedded

3. Hotels as Soft Targets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bckBizRgRI4

4. Times Square Bomber & U.S. Security Loopholes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ex-Rct40rFU

5. Security Of Our Trains & Ports
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PRlviNrdhw&feature=player_embedded

Travel Channel

Tips for Earthquake and Tsunami Preparedness

By LISA SINGH

Quick safety tips

While more than a couple dozen major earthquakes measuring 7 to 7.9 on the richter scale occur each year, the likelihood of a traveler enduring the potentially traumatic effects of an earthquake is pretty remote. Still, an earthquake can happen at any time and travelers to popular destinations along the Pacific Rim – such as Hawaii, California, Mexico City, and most of Japan – that are known for a history of the tremors should know how to react to them.

“Preparedness is a constant process, which begins way before the shaking starts,” says Dr. Marla Petal, a co-director of Risk RED, which provides disaster prevention education. “For travelers, the most important asset they have is a good imagination about what can happen when the ground shakes,” says Petal. “Think about the things that can fall, slide, fly, and what they can hit.”

Here are some tips on ways to stay prepared for an earthquake.

1. Ask the hotel preliminary questions. Check to see if the building is “life safe,” with routine fire and emergency drills, an evacuation plan, and fire safety inspections. Poor maintenance at a hotel is a clear warning sign. It could indicate termite infestation, which compromises the integrity of wood-framed structures.

And if the hotel is by the water? “Ask them about their evacuation plan, and where the ’safe’ points are, how they’ll alert guests of an impending tsunami,” says Phil Sylvester, travel safety expert with WorldNomads.com, a travel insurance company.

2. Assess your surroundings. Adjust your room to make it safer during an earthquake. Move your bed if it is near a wardrobe center. Make sure furnishings are secure. Know where the nearest fire extinguisher is and the last time it was serviced. And ensure that the hotel’s exit routes are locked.

3. Write a family reunification plan. Determine where your family would to reunite before the trip if a quake strikes. And designate a contact person back home as the go-to source for each family member.

4. Bring a flashlight. Carry a professional grade flashlight. An LED flashlight lasts longer than non-LED flashlights. Also essential, says Petal, is a tactical light stick to attract attention if you need critical help. And don’t light a match, which would cause an explosion if there’s a gas leak.

SureFire Flashlights
Pelican Products Light
Coast LED Lenser Flashlight
Tactical lightstick

5. Think water safety. Carry iodine tablets and water filters. Iodine tablets block radiation absorption and can be purchased at a pharmacy. More critical is the need for a water filter, because an earthquake can render drinking water undrinkable, says Christopher Falkenberg, president of Insite, a security company that advises high net worth individuals and families on matters of international and domestic travel security, who recommends the following options.

LifeStraw
Katadyn water filters

6. Don’t forget a mask filter. The dust that whips up during and after an earthquake is not anything to breathe in. The N95 respirator mask filters out 95 percent of airborne particles. Also bring along a medical kit.

Kimberly Clark N95 respirator
Suture Medic Kit

7. Drop! Cover! Hold on! “If you feel any shaking, make yourself a small target, covering your head and neck because they’re most vulnerable to serious injury,” says Petal. A traveler in bed when an earthquake hits should stay there. Do not seek shelter in a bathtub. Tile, glass, and porcelain can cut and bruise.

8. Know tsunami warning signs. Three vital signs that a tsunami might occur include shakes and tremors underfoot, the sea receding below normal low tide and a loud roar. “Be alert to any warnings made by local authorities, which can be radio broadcasts or an audible alert [such as] a siren,” says Sylvester. “And if you see large numbers of locals suddenly fleeing the beach area, go with them,” he adds.

9. Get to the second floor. When Sylvester reflects on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, he notes that many who perished were on the ground or in buildings lower than 2 stories. That’s why it’s essential to get inside a concrete building and get up to the second floor so you’re well above water, he says.” Fortunately, in coastal resort areas, hotels are often in high-rise concrete buildings where people can get up to the second story (or higher) to escape a tsunami.

Security Management Magazine

The Real Price of Virtual Kidnappings

By MATTHEW HARWOOD

A man travels to Mexico on business. During his trip, his wife receives a call from her husband’s cell phone. Upon answering, she hears screaming. Then the voice of a stranger comes onto the phone, saying the screams were those of her husband, whom he has kidnapped. He demands a money transfer of $1,000 within five hours, adding that if he doesn’t get the payment, he will kill her husband. A few expletives are thrown in for emphasis.

The wife is terrified. She calls her husband’s cell phone, and the same man answers. Convinced he has her husband, she complies with his demands and sends $1,000 through Western Union.

Hours later the husband calls and tells her what actually happened. His cell phone was stolen earlier that day.

The wife in this scenario has just been the victim of the crime of “virtualy kidnapping,” where criminals leverage a stolen cell phone or stolen personal information to scare a quick ransom payment out of a company or a family without ever abducting anyone.

The practice has become so prevalent in Mexico that the government has created a cell phone registry to try and track down virtual kidnappers.

Christopher Voss, managing director of Insite Security’s kidnapping resolution practice and a former FBI kidnap and ransom negotiator, tells Security Management of one case the FBI worked on in the San Diego area. A family’s college-aged kid went down to Tijuana to party and lost his ID and his phone. Knowing they had some time before the hung-over co-ed started looking for his missing property, the people who found it decided they had time to try and extort money from his parents. In this case, they called the FBI, which determined that it was a hoax, and the parents did not pay the ransom.

Special Agent Brad Bryant, chief of the FBI’s Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Unit, says the bureau has no open virtual kidnapping investigations in the United States to his knowledge, but that doesn’t indicate how often cases occur. Solid statistics on this type of crime are hard to come by, says Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence for STRATFOR, a private intelligence firm. Multinational companies that have fallen victim to the ruse won’t publicize it for fear of harming their brand and making themselves and their employees a bigger target for other virtual kidnappers. Burton confirmed to Security Management that U.S. companies have been victimized but would not elaborate.

Burton adds that he would look on any virtual kidnapping statistics with a grain of salt. “I don’t think there’s any one entity that you can go to that’s capable of providing…accurate numbers,” he says.

While the specifics may be hard to nail down, there’s no doubt that, in general, virtual kidnappings are attractive to criminals and are likely to continue to be a problem. “From the criminal’s side, there’s very little investment in time or effort,” explains Voss.

When criminals carry out real kidnappings, they need safe houses to hide the abducted subjects, and they must go to the trouble to keep them reasonably cared for if they plan to return them for the ransom. Virtual kidnappers, on the other hand, just need a phone line, some personal information, and the ability to terrify their victim-which isn’t hard when he or she believes an employee or a loved one’s life is on the line.

There are ways to avoid being the victim of a virtual kidnapping scheme, say experts. One of the first and most important steps is to practice good cell-phone hygiene. Jaime Garcia, security manager for Mexico and Texas for the automotive parts maker Delphi, advises employees to go through their cell phones and eliminate any generic names.

“There should be no ‘home,’ ‘offie,’ ‘babe,’ ‘honey,’ ‘whatever,” he says. That way, a virtual kidnapper can’t just steal a phone and hit one of those contacts to make the ransom call. Garcia suggests that travelers clear their calling history daily so that a thief won’t be able to guess by the frequency of calls that a particular number is a loved one or an employer.

He also advises employees with the ability to password protect their cell phone or smartphone to do so. Virtual kidnappers can’t access phone numbers or personal information if they can’t get at it. And they need that type of information to carry out their scheme.

Cell phones are not the only source of that type of personal information, however. Virtual kidnappers also harvest personal numbers and family information from wallets or purses they’ve stolen, says Voss.

That’s why Garcia tells his traveling employees to “sanatize” their wallets and purses-to cleanse them of the type of personal data that a virtual kidnapper could use, such as pictures of loved ones with names on the back, which would help a virtual kidnapper weave a convincing story. Travelers should also be careful not to give personal information inadvertently or carelessly; the person requesting it might have ulterior motives.

If a company or loved one does receive a ransom call, they can’t know whether it is for real, so the same rules of kidnapping apply: “proof,” says Voss. If a voice over a phone says they have your employee or loved one, ask the caller, “How do I know he’s alive? Can I speak with him?”

According to Voss, asking that question will not increase the risk to the person if they really are kidnapped, because professional kidnappers know they must prove the abducted person is alive for payment. They are, after all, basically profit-seeking businessmen.

“If you’ve got someone claiming to have kidnapped an employee or a loved one, and they want the money now, and they want it wired now, they probably don’t have him,” says Voss.

People don’t have to go it alone, however. The FBI’s Bryant says American employers or family members who receive a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped their employee or family member in another country should contact their local FBI field office and the State Department immediately. The State Department will contact the U.S. Embassy in the relevant country.

If it’s in Mexico, “They’ll contact our legal attache in Mexico, who has a good relationship with Mexican law enforcement,” Bryant says.

Garcia recommends having employees prepare two code words with their offices and families to quickly confirm proof of life as well as how grave the situation is. Garcia, who travels nearly every day into Mexico, says he has already done this with his family. One code word is positive, and it means that kidnappers have him, he’s in good shape, and negotiate for his release. The negative code word, however, means he’s in poor shape and to do whatever is necessary to get him out as fast as possible.

“If my family does not hear a code word, they’re to hang up,” he says. “Because it’s only one of two things: They don’t have me, or I’m already dead. So there’s no reason to be sending money if I’m already gone.”

Another thing a company can do to protect against virtual kidnapping is to let all employees know that honesty won’t end in their termination. If a traveling employee goes out, gets drunk, and loses a company’s electronic device with sensitive corporate or personal information on it, the office should want him to report it immediately.

“The bottom line is (an employee) is going to put his company in a bad position in having to potentially pay the ransom when he wasn’t kidnapped, he was hung over,” Voss says.

More importantly, companies should educate employees so that they know they need to follow commonsense security precautions as discussed, using a password to protect data on their phone, for example. During travel, they should be required to call their office and loved ones at designated times to let them know everything is okay. Finally, employees need to become more aware of their surroundings so that they don’t make themselves an easy mark.

http://www.securitymanagement.com/article/real-price-virtual-kidnappings-008239?page=0%2C0

The Financial Times’ White Collar Crime Reporter Kara Scannell included Christopher Falkenberg of Insite Security as the lead source in a front page story titled, “SEC case prompts hedge funds to sweep for bugs.” See below for a snapshot of the story:

***********************************

Hedge fund managers are hiring security firms to sweep their offices and homes for listening devices, security experts say, in reaction to the US government’s insider trading investigations.

“Over the past six months, there has been a really heightened interest in electronic sweeps for hedge funds,” said Christopher Falkenberg, founder of Insite Security, a security and risk management firm in New York. “They’re working harder at clamping down on their information security and making sure the telephones are secured and the offices aren’t being bugged. We’ve also been asked to sweep traders’ homes.”

Read more here http://bit.ly/InsiteSecurityFT

The Record

Is it safe there? Scoping out trouble spots for travel

By JILL SCHENSUL

You never know when you might encounter danger.

Like in Egypt. Who knew?

One day, record numbers of travelers are jamming the Cairo museum, contemplating Cleo along the Nile and tanning on the beach in Sharm el Sheikh. Twelve hours later, they’re rushing through streets filled with angry protesters, abandoning tour plans and vacations of a lifetime for a flight that will get them out of harm’s way.

A lot of those fleeing travelers believed Egypt was a safe place to visit. Sure, there had been some bombings, some violence in the past. But all’s been quiet on the Egyptian front for several years now.

Why else would so many people be visiting? Why would Egypt be an increasingly popular choice for families? Things happen. You can’t always foresee situations that may be unsafe, even dangerous.

Then again, there are ways to manage your risk of unpleasant surprises.

Take Egypt. Some say the recent violence couldn’t have been predicted. But Christopher Falkenberg, a national security expert and former Secret Service agent, says that if you had been monitoring events in the country, you would have known Egypt was unstable and a risky place for a leisurely vacation.

Falkenberg’s company, Insite Security, specializes in personal security for “high-net-worth individuals” as well as large national and multinational corporations. His company and others employ thousands of people and have sources on the ground, all over the world, updating them on dangerous or unhealthy situations.

Most average travelers couldn’t afford that sort of security blanket. But we don’t have to blithely wander off into the world, either.

Information is available from a variety of sources on pretty much any destination you might want to visit. Information – or, in the spirit of this subject, let’s call it “intelligence” – will give you the lay of the land at your destination, in terms of crime directed against tourists, violence, what specific neighborhoods or regions to avoid and what health risks you might encounter.

Some places are obviously more unsafe than others. Midst-of-war countries are no-brainers, along with those cities perennially making the Top 10 list of crime capitals of the world (Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez topped the list this year). But crime statistics don’t always reflect the average tourist’s experience. And the average tourist experience may not be your experience, either. For instance, gum-free Singapore, one of the safest places in the world, is the only place I’ve ever had my wallet stolen.

Here are some of the steps you can take to reduce your risks:

Background info

• The U.S. State Department website publishes country-specific information for every nation in the world, fact sheets with info on entry requirements, crime and security conditions, areas of instability, road safety and other details relevant to travel. It also offers travel alerts and warnings. Warnings recommend that Americans defer travel to a country because of civil unrest, dangerous conditions or terrorist activity, or because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with the country and would have difficulty assisting Americans in an emergency. Alerts don’t advise against travel altogether, but are used to draw attention to terrorist threats and other relatively short-term or transnational conditions that could pose “significant risks” to American travelers.

• By law, any official safety advice the government relays to its own employees must also be shared with the public. But “the government may have issues and concerns for its employees different from the issues travelers are concerned about,” Falkenberg said. He added that State Department decisions include political /diplomatic considerations: A travel warning can undermine a country’s tourism industry and revenue. Which is why you should also check the travel advice issued by other countries – specifically, Canada, the U.K. and Australia – to round out your picture of the situation.

• Talk to people at the destination’s local embassy or consulate. Ask them what types of problems a tourist might encounter. While they won’t contradict the official government line, they can offer actual examples of incidents, to help you decide whether you’re up to the challenge, or how best to prepare for your trip.

• Read the local English-language paper for the destination. It’s covering day-to-day events.

• Don’t assume that because a tour operator is conducting tours in an area, it’s safe to go there.

• Bring along key contact numbers and addresses in case of emergency: local police stations, the local U.S. embassy, the number for the State Department’s Office of American Citizen Services and Crisis Management (888-407-4747; from overseas: 202-501-4444).

• Carry emergency numbers for anyone who’s helped you book your trip: tour operator, travel agent, cruise line. If you’ve purchased trip insurance, make sure you have the 24-hour help hot line.

• Check the Centers for Disease Control site (cdc.gov/travel) for information on health issues and what vaccines or medicines, if any, you might need. The CDC also has information on environmental conditions that might affect your health – e.g., high altitude or pollution. The site also offers information on safe food and water practices and insect-bite protection. There’s info on what type of medical facilities and medications are available in the country, too. Another source: the World Health Organization (who.int/ith).

• Get in STEP. The State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program enables officials or your family to contact you while you’re abroad, either because of a family emergency at home or because of a crisis in the place you’re visiting. It’s free and you can sign up online: travelregistration.state .gov. They promise not to broadcast your information.

• Some types of insurance also include (usually at a premium) travel alerts and intelligence. These aren’t your usual trip-interruption and cancellation insurance providers, but companies like Global Rescue (globalrescue.com) and International SOS (internationalsos.com), which focus on emergency services such as medical evacuation.

In country

American consulates are where to turn when situations turn problematic or disastrous. Staff can help Americans who are in serious legal, medical or financial trouble, including health emergencies, arrests, deaths, crimes or missing-persons cases. The State Department has specific information on what to do in a variety of scenarios, from finding a hospital or doctor to getting funds from the Office of Overseas Citizens Services’ trust fund when you find yourself destitute. Check out travel.state.gov/travel/tips/emergencies/emergencies_1205.html#general#general.

Once you’re armed with the facts, you can decide whether the destination is safe enough. And if it’s a go, you’ll be able to rely on intel rather than just your good karma to avoid dangerous areas and situations.

Yes, the world can be a dangerous place. But the reality is that major incidents aren’t the norm. Chances of getting murdered really are small compared with chances of learning something or having an epiphany in a new place.

E-mail: schensul@northjersey.com

Sizing up the possible danger zones

In addition to Egypt and Tunisia, what spots will be hot – in the negative sense – this year? iJET Intelligent Risk Systems, founded in 1999, employs 50-plus intelligence analysts to answer that very question. With more than 15,000 sources on situations worldwide, it provides intelligence and insight to corporations, executives and travelers. Here is iJet’s “Risk Landscape for 2011.”

THE AMERICAS

Guatemala: Combating a surge in drug-cartel-related violence spilling over from Mexico.

Nicaragua and Honduras: Increased government instability could materialize, resulting in civil unrest.

Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia: Important elections could perpetuate political instability and violent protests.

EUROPE

Russia: If Prime Minister Vladimir Putin decides to run for president, the country may see an increase in civil unrest.

MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA:

Yemen: The current terrorist-related violence can be expected to continue, further exacerbated by the release of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks in late 2010.

Saudi Arabia: May face succession issues that could bring uncertainty and instability.

Lebanon: Tensely awaiting the verdict in the death of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The controversy will keep regional politics – already perennially unstable – particularly unsettled.

AFRICA

Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast): The battle for the presidency has created instability throughout the country. If President Laurent Gbagbo refuses to resign, leaders in other African nations could follow suit and threaten the positive governance trends across the continent.

The outcome will strongly influence a number of key political referendums and elections that will take place this year in countries including Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Nigeria, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Sudan/South Sudan: The recent vote that the south of Sudan will break away and form its own country will resonate strongly across Africa – and beyond – and could embolden separatist movements elsewhere.
ASIA

Thailand: Succession issues could arise, leading to another wave of riots and violent protests.

North and South Korea: Uncertainty and animosity between the two countries will keep the region unsettled.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: Will continue to pose grave challenges for the region and the world.

OTHER FACTORS

Haiti’s earthquake and the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud crisis are reminders that unforeseeable events such as natural disasters and terrorist incidents remain a threat. Outbreaks of H1N1 are on the decline, so pandemic-size health threats are not expected this year. Seasonal influenzas and other health risks – such as the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti – should be closely monitored, as epidemics are also unpredictable.

How to Protect Members of Congress

By MARC AMBINDER

On Wednesday, the FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police will brief members of Congress on basic security precautions they can take when they’re interacting with constituents. Also on the agenda: an explanation of how Capitol Police officers conduct threat assessments. What the members are likely to hear may be as simple as surrounding themselves with aides wearing suits or setting up a thin rope line to create a slight barrier between them and possible danger.

They will also hear about threats beyond the shooting in Tucson, Ariz. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrence Gainer told WTOP Radio on Monday that he had referred 49 threats against senators alone to the FBI within the past year. But the rarity of actual assassination attempts against members of Congress underscores the challenge for investigators.

“A lot of people will talk, but a tiny few will act; and most who act tend not to talk beforehand,” is how one current federal agent describes people who threaten public officials.

Killing the president or vice president might significantly jeopardize national security, which is why merely threatening to kill the commander-in-chief and his deputy are Class De felonies. It’s much tougher, however, for prosecutors to build cases against people who threaten members of Congress.

No central database exists of every e-mail sent to a congressional office, and most members of Congress would be horrified if it did. If an assault occurs, the FBI takes over, as it would for an incident involving any federal government employee, from letter carriers to lawmakers.

Still, according to former Secret Service agents and current physical-protection specialists, members can take commonsense steps to reduce the likelihood of an incident, steps that only mildly compromise their access to the public, if at all.

According to a federal official who is preparing the advice, the Capitol Police will recommend that when members hold well-publicized outside events with uncontrolled access, they should request the presence of a police officer from the local jurisdiction. In most cases, the police will know about the event anyway, because congressional staffers would have obtained permits.

In a conference call with members yesterday, Capitol Police officials emphasized that local police agencies will rarely refuse a request from a member of Congress to provide an officer for such events – and that if those agencies do, members should ask the Capitol Police to intercede.

Local police officers tend to be less intimidating than private bodyguards and often are seen as members of the community, so their presence isn’t likely to deter anyone who is friendly from attending an event. They can watch members of the crowd for suspicious behavior or for people who just seem particularly nervous, as several witnesses described Giffords’s alleged assailant, Jared Loughner, moments before the shooting.

The mere presence of an armed police officer, even 20 feet away from the principal, can deter an attacker – a technique that personal-security teams use to great effect.

The 40,000-member New York City Police Department routinely assigns an officer to senators when they are in the city. But it’s not reasonable to expect, say, the California Highway Patrol to provide officers for every congressional event held by all 54 members of the state’s congressional delegation during a recess. Nor are small-town police departments always able to spare officers. Moreover, the willingness of local enforcement to help out will probably diminish as this most recent incident recedes into the past.

So, aides who set up the events must assume some responsibility. “When these staffers go out and do these advance visits, [the events] are mostly scheduled and looked at from the perspective of what the VIP wants,” said Bruce Bowen, a former deputy director of the Secret Service. “They have to go into a new mode, if you will”: Start taking a look at from a quasi-security perspective.”That is, look at an event the way a Secret Service agent might.

If the member is sitting at a table, make sure the table is positioned near some sort of concrete pillar that could provide cover. Make sure that the member can quickly move to a vehicle if something happens. A bit of training can help staffers detect unusual behavior in a crowd, said Bowen, who also ran the government’s federal law-enforcement training program and is now a principal at the Command Consulting Group.

“On the day of the event, you get there early, and you watch for early arrivals; you watch for outlandish behavior and clothing; you see if someone is sweating but it’s 45 degrees out; if someone has unusual clothing on which could hide a weapon; or if someone keeps moving to a different part of the crowd.”

(Bowen doesn’t recommend that the staffers intervene – simply notifying a police officer or their boss might be sufficient, he says.)

Indeed, having an emergency plan – briefing the member on what to do in the event of an emergency – increases the likelihood that he or she will react quickly.

For particularly large events, Bowen said, lawmakers should request a threat or risk analysis from the Capitol Police and FBI, which would then dictate whether they should request additional help from local police officers.

Another bit of advice: Indoor events tend to be safer than outdoor ones, and even the presence of a sign-in table – constituents can bypass it if they want – might increase the anxiety level of someone who intends to do harm.

A simple rope line decorated with an American flag creates a safe zone. “Even though the cordon will be of something as fragile as a silken cord, it still creates a psychological barrier and slows anyone attempting to approach the platform from the crowd as they go over and under it,” Leroy Thompson, a professional bodyguard who has protected queens, kings, and celebrities, writes in an executive-protection manual.

Presidential candidates quickly learn that a small entourage provides a security benefit. When Mitt Romney first ran for president, he was often surrounded by young aides wearing lapel pins. To the uninitiated, they looked like Secret Service agents or bodyguards, and I often heard members of the public identifying them as such.

Romney did not have Secret Service protection during his 2008 presidential bid, but the presence of a young man (or woman) in a suit, standing close to a famous person, marks them as a security officer, even though they are usually staffers who help the candidate wade through a crowd or write down requests from constituents or autograph seekers. In 2003, Howard Dean’s campaign team debated whether to hire private bodyguards to deal with the surging crowds he was attracting. They eventually settled for jersey barriers at large events.

What security pros call “set-back” can also be built into the event.Gavin de Becker’s firm, which has provided security for Arnold Schwarzenegger and heads of state, conducted a study simulating conditions that a would-be attacker might face at a public event. It found that bodyguards stationed 7 feet away from the crowd have a good chance of intercepting an assailant before he or she is able to pull the trigger.

“Safety is nearly assured when the setup keeps the nearest members of the public more than 25 feet away from the protectee,” de Becker writes in “Just 2 Seconds,” a study of recent assassinations and protective methodology.

It is not clear that any of these methods would have prevent Saturday’s mass shooting. A police officer, for example, might have been reluctant to return fire if the assailant emerged from a crowd of innocents.

Chris Falkenberg, a former Secret Secret agent who now runs a private-security firm that has protected politicians and celebrities (including Martha Stewart), said that proactive threat assessment is the “most efficient and cost-effective way of reducing this threat.” It’s the Capitol Police’s responsibility, he said, to brief members and their Washington and district staffers on the type of communications from constituents that could be dangerous. The follow-up is just as important.

The Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting about 20 executive-branch officials, former presidents, and members of their families – and also foreign heads of state and embassies in the U.S. – is able to devote significant resources to threat assessment because its agents are spread across the country and because of the relatively small number of people in their charge. “You can’t do that for 535 members of Congress,” Falkenberg said.

When the Capitol Police receives a threat, officers regularly check it against databases kept by the Secret Service and other agencies, officials said, and information interoperability isn’t a problem.“

USCP maintains several liaison positions within the intelligence community (i.e.: FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security Department) enabling us to share and receive intelligence information,” said Kimberly Schneider, the Capitol Police spokesperson.

But counting threats, according to a veteran of protective threat assessments who is still in government, can’t take the place of a process that treats a threat “like a living document.”

“It takes into account a person’s visibility in the community, where they live when they travel, whether the interests expressed are of a threatening nature. And it’s open and constantly being revised,” this official said. The Secret Service, for example, has dozens of field offices across the country, and agents monitor threats dynamically. It is not usual, for example, for an agent to take someone who is deemed to be a threat to the president to a movie the afternoon that the president visits.

A more efficient system for analyzing, processing, and diffusing threats requires personnel and training that the Capitol Police’s threat desk is unlikely to acquire – and, indeed, is at variance with protecting free expression.

After Capitol Police officers complete their basic law-enforcement training, they receive extensive training in executive protection at a specialized facility in Maryland near Andrews Air Force Base. Officers are often so well trained that they find themselves in demand by other agencies, who snap them up quickly, Bowen said.

Congress, Agencies Focus on Security in Wake of Arizona Shootings

By ANDY MEDICI

Legislative offices and federal agencies should expect enhanced security and a careful review of their security procedures following Saturday’s shootings in Arizona, said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

The shootings – which wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 13 others and killed six, including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll – are a reminder of the vulnerability of members of Congress and federal officials, Adler said.

But even if every member of Congress and high-ranking federal official had a security detail, it would not eliminate risk, he said. He called on law enforcement and the public to continue working together to identify risks and protect the public.

“We can’t eliminate risk, we can’t eliminate deranged gunmen, but we can work together to help prevent the damage and increase public safety,” Adler said, citing the civilians who stepped in to help save lives by stopping the gunman at Gifford’s “Congress on the Corner” event outside a Tucson grocery store.

Other fatal shootings – such as at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 and at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas a year ago – also sparked security reviews, but it shouldn’t take a tragedy to review procedures and identify vulnerabilities, Adler said.

The Fort Hood shootings sparked an independent review that made 79 recommendations to fix issues involving background checks, soldier care and the sharing of criminal information within the military.

Adler said that while the Arizona shooting will also lead to a review, there are limits to what officers can do on limited budgets.

Chris Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent and founder of Insite Security, said that it would be enormously costly and difficult to give every congressional member and senior federal official a security detail.

Members of Congress and federal officials will have to rely more on local law enforcement to secure areas for speeches or events, he said. Already, legislative offices have been asked to designate one staffer in their home districts to be a liaison with local law enforcement, according to a summary of a bipartisan conference call held Sunday and provided by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas.

Capitol Police Chief Philip Morse said in the conference call that local law enforcement does not have responsibility for protecting Congress members any more than other citizens, but they can enforce local law and assist members with public events.

Congress might eventually approve some funding for assistance from local police, and congressional offices might end up paying for private security for their members, Falkenberg said.

Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokesman for the Capitol Police, said in a statement that the agency does not discuss specific security and protective measures.

However, the Capitol Police has advised members of Congress to take “reasonable and prudent precautions regarding their personal safety and security.” The Capitol Police guards the Capitol complex and grounds, and is helping investigate the Arizona shooting.

Other federal law enforcement agencies did not respond to request for comments.

Terrance Gainer, Senate sergeant at arms, told Federal News Radio that his office and the Capitol Police were looking at security arrangements for members of Congress and their staffs. Gainer and representatives of the Capitol Police and FBI are expected to provide an in-depth security overview Wednesday for the full Congress. .

Rep. Bob Brady, D-Pa., told CNN that he would introduce legislation that would extend the ban on presidential threats to members of Congress and other federal officials.

He told CNN that he would propose a bill that would make it a crime for “a person to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a member of Congress or federal official.”

Pressure Points

Stay cool in the clutch with these four easy strategies

Does the pressure ever get to you? Ever had the right skills, but failed to come through when you were needed most? You’re not alone. Most people choke at some point. The good news is that you can learn to minimize those flops. In Paul Sullivan’s book Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t, he takes a look at real-world players who shined when the stakes were the highest. Here are four lessons you can learn from them.

Christopher Falkenberg
Secret Service agent
Big Moment “In 1992, Falkenberg was a young Secret Service agent assigned to guard presidential candidate Bill Clinton,” Sullivan says. “Within a few months, Clinton was rising in the polls and attracting real crowds. At a stop in California, a man emerged from the crowd and grabbed Clinton. When Clinton said he could not free his hand, Falkenberg swiftly broke the man’s arm, and whisked Clinton to a waiting SUV and away from the event.”
The Lesson Adaptability.”Secret Service agents are trained to do as much as possible to ensure that things like this don’t happen. But it is not always the reality. So when the man was able to penetrate the Secret Service perimeter, Falkenberg had to adapt quickly. The key is keeping a single goal in mind. For Falkenberg, this was freeing our future president and getting him to safety.”

Bernie Marcus
Founder of The Home Depot
Big Moment “As Marcus was about to open the first Home Depot, he realized he was short merchandise. So he ordered empty boxes for out-of-reach shelves. He had been fired from his last job and knew a lot rode on this idea. Home Depot made Marcus a billionaire.”
The Lesson Using fear and desire. “Under pressure, a desire to succeed can be more effective when tempered by fear. Marcus and his partners dubbed their philosophy ‘running scared,’ and never lost sight that a few mistakes can derail a company. They desired to succeed and drove the company in that direction but maintained a healthy fear of what could bring them down.”

Ari Kiev
Consultant to Olympians and hedge fund managers
Big Moment “Kiev worked with the U.S. Olympic team, helping athletes improve under pressure. The riflery team wanted to know why it shot better in competition than in practice, where there were no opponents charging at you or fans shouting. Despite that calm, the best in the world missed their targets.”
The Lesson Discipline. “The riflemen better managed the stress of competition because they remembered the importance of shooting during the stillness between breaths. Kiev took that notion of discipline to the stock market, teaching traders the essential discipline needed to set limits-both positive and negative-that would tell them when best to sell a stock.”

Larry Clarke
Broadway and TV actor
Big Moment “Clarke was preparing for opening night of the play Streamers. If he botched the closing monologue, the play would fail. But as the curtain went up, Clarke said he was charged up by having all eyes on him.”
The Lesson Being present. “Many of us suffer from stage fright. Clarke has found a way to turn that to an advantage. He learned this the hard way when filming his first Law & Order episode. When the director shouted ‘Action!’ Clarke began to mumble. He felt awed by the famous cast around him. Once he made himself present and began thinking of them as colleagues, he was able to really act.”

Deception Detectors Find a New Niche

KYLE STOCK

When screening a fund manager, investors like to see experience and a consistent record or returns. Elizabeth Prial, however, looks for dilated pupils and uneven breathing.

Ms. Prial, a psychologist and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, has spent most of her career looking for lies in the statements of mafia hitmen and terrorists. Now, she’s on the hunt for the next Bernard Madoff, selling her deception-detection skills to institutional investors and others with large pools of money who want to know if prospective fund managers are telling the truth.

“It’s usually very clear,” she said. “I’m 90% confident in most of the things that I can see.”

Amid the rush to fortify the nation’s still-rickety regulations in the wake of the financial crisis, affluent investors are turning to behavioral specialists, looking to find things in faces and phrases that may not be revealed in financial statements.

J.J. Newberry, a lauded California-based human lie detector, has trained almost a dozen investment professionals in workshops typically reserved for police officers and government agents.

Mark Frank, another deception detection consultant who teaches at the University of Buffalo, said in recent months he has repeatedly turned down requests to analyze subjects for Wall Street firms.

Eccentric screening techniques are nothing new to Wall Street. Seigmund Warburg, founder of the giant London-based investment bank S. G. Warburg & Co., was notorious for subjecting customers and employees to psychological tests. He was particularly diligent about evaluating hand-writing samples of would-be workers, in attempt to uncover character flaws.

Ms. Prial, 43 years old, has assessed almost 50 fund managers on behalf of prospective investors. Though she still consults for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, her private sector employer is Insite Security, a New York-based firm that also sells standard due diligence and workplace disaster-preparedness plans. Insite’s clients – pension funds, affluent families and private-equity companies – pay about $10,000 a meeting for the service.

Ms. Prial, slim, dark-haired and unassuming, is introduced as an associate and sits quietly while the would-be fund manager is interviewed by Insite’s client. She watches and listens for the myriad subtle signs that researchers have linked to lying: facial twitches, changes in breathing tempo, and shifts in language patterns.

Professional human lie detectors said that people are uncomfortable with untruths and will show that in certain ways, such as microexpressions – brief flashes of fear or other emotions in a face – or concealing motions like crossing one’s legs or touching one’s face. Lies in speech are often flagged by a switch from the first person to the third person, as when a subject suddenly begins speaking on behalf of “the firm” or “the team.”

“The most accurate indicator is the pupil size changing,” Ms. Prial said. “If you can be close enough to see that, then you’re golden.”

But deceptive “tells” are not universal, which is where the psychology comes into play. Human lie detectors said the practice is most effective when the analyst can establish a pattern of behavior and then flag transgressions from that pattern.

“I can’t say ‘Oh, when they scratch their nose, they’re lying,’” Ms. Prial said. “It’s more like: ‘What does this person look like when they’re telling the truth, and when do those characteristics disappear?’”

Traditional polygraphers and investigators employ many of the same interviewing techniques as Ms. Prial. Skeptics, however, abound. A federal initiative that trained about 3,000 airport screeners in similar techniques has sparked debate. In a May report, the Government Accountability Office called into question the effectiveness and the scientific foundation of deception-detection techniques.

Jim Roth, founder of corporate intelligence firm The Langley Group, said the results can be inconsistent and less than telling.

“If you did nothing but deception detection, I don’t think it gets you very far,” he said. “In my world, I would characterize it as a small tool.”

Mr. Roth said straightforward analysis can be more useful. When investigating a company for potential weaknesses, his firm looks for less subjective things: an exodus in the ranks of middle management, a spike in the ratio of accounts receivable to revenue, and unusual share sales by top executives.

Even professional lie detectors say that their work is fallible. Humans lack “a Pinocchio’s nose,” and some people simply can’t be read with accuracy.

Insite wouldn’t reveal its clients, and Ms. Prial doesn’t keep any written record of her work. Christopher Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent who founded Insite, said the value of the service is in identifying “hot spots,” areas where some more probing might reveal a lie or information that a subject is trying to conceal.

Mr. Falkenberg said the idea to hire Ms. Prial was triggered by the fraud cases against Mr. Madoff and Allen Stanford, who slipped by formal federal inquiries many times.

“It occurred to me that had the victims called us, we would have utilized very standard due diligence techniques,” he said. “But I can’t tell you that we would have been able to find the very nuanced covers that were evidence of these scams.”

Ms. Prial, a relatively passive mutual-fund investor, is still getting used to the ways of Wall Street, after years spent analyzing criminals and terrorists.

People on Wall Street are better liars, she said. Fund managers she screens are more self-aware than common criminals or terrorists and thus more skilled at covering up their deceptions, she added. Ms. Prial also said many honest investment professionals have behaviors that point to narcissism, a trait that often goes hand-in-hand with deception. She has had to learn that an inflated sense of self isn’t a suspicious anomaly on Wall Street.

Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens conduct business all over the world for companies in places like Mexico, Russia, Nigeria, Iraq, and the Philippines. At any given moment, two to four of those Americans are being held hostage outside of the United States.

What happens? How should a company respond? Who’s responsible for handling the negotiations?

Christopher Voss, Managing Director of Insite Security’s Kidnapping Resolution Practice (and one of the FBI’s most seasoned kidnapping negotiators) penned an article in Security Management on the topic.

Security Management Magazine

The Victim, the Family, the Company: The Three Dimensions of Consequence During a Kidnapping

By Christopher Voss

One of your employees has been kidnapped overseas. You feel the initial shock of hearing the news. Your instant reaction is “I’m responsible. He’s there on my behalf. We’re going to get him out if I have to myself.” Your mind springs into gear…

To read the full article please visit: http://bit.ly/SecurityManagementMagazine

How SAC Thrives On The Genius Of Clutch

By MICHAEL MARTIN

It immediately occurred to me while reading Paul Sullivan’s brilliant new book Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Other Don’t that great traders are clutch players who are “on call.” They must always deliver results while pressure is just one or two losing trades away.

We know that nurture beats nature. Yet at the same time, how is it that some folks just seem born for destiny. What do they do? How is it that for some people, something happens somewhere between being born and that moment when they are called to deliver the goods in a clutch moment and make history while the rest of us watch?

Clutch happens a lot in everyday life. It happens in sports and it happens right under our noses and we might not know it’s clutch that we’re observing.

Legendary trader Steve Cohen is very well aware being clutch. He sits among all his traders during the day. His focus is so intense that he mandates the phones don’t ring – instead lights blink when someone’s calling.

Unlike Commodities Corporation, where traders such as Michael Marcus and Bruce Kovner could be generalists, SAC traders are specialists in a sector. This is not by accident.

Part of the ethos at SAC is to have traders focus on one sector, this way they’re not trading everything from Yahoo to Exxon to Big Cap Pharma. If they trade tech, they stick with tech. If they trade energies, they stick with energies. Their knowledge is narrowly focused but it runs extremely deep.

This serves two purposes: the traders are less likely to be caught off-guard because they are experts in the sector. Two, they’re not running around chasing their tails trying to figure out what’s happening with many companies within many sectors.

More importantly, Cohen had the late great Ari Kiev at the helm of his firm in order to help his traders with psychological baggage. “Kiev wanted to show people that baggage they carry from their pasts could hold them back in their futures. He argued that it distracted them and hurt their ability to make key decisions in the present.” In order to help traders with the stress he would remind them that the best traders are correct only 60% of the time at best. “So if you lose on four trades out of 10, you are still performing with the best of the best.”

Part of their training with Kiev was to get them to become informed risk takers. These are not traders who exist by trading on gut instinct. What Kiev found out was that these traders didn’t like to fail, which Sullivan says is very different from “the dislike of losing.” All traders lose at some point, but it doesn’t mean they failed. The best traders figure out how to avoid losing strategies, and at SAC this is part of their training. The best traders don’t fear failure: they hate it.

Kiev said “as stress increases the ability to think rationally declines.” I bet that is an exponentially inverse relationship. As stress increases, your ability to act under pressure, if untrained, drops precipitously. You are actually done long before you know it. In order to persist during losing periods, Kiev would help the traders learn to relax when performing under duress.

You can’t remove the stress from trading entirely, but you can help the trader recognize when they are under stress, and help them avoid stressful situations by recognizing them before they occur. The keys to becoming a clutch trader a la SAC is to first create performance goals, get out at your pre-determined loss level when you’re wrong, and liquidating your winners at predetermined levels also.

Through rigorous practice and simulation, this simple model works wonders on your performance – and your equity. As I stress to my own students, “there are no external solutions to your internal problems.” If you don’t learn to LOVE taking consistent small losses, you’ll never be around long enough to ENJOY the big gains. If you’re losing money, you cannot think about the losing position. You must get out so that you can regroup and think clearly.

In Clutch, Sullivan tells a story about “shooting first and figuring it out later,” so to speak. Secret Service Agent Christopher Falkenberg was called on to protect Governor Bill Clinton during a campaign stop at USC in the spring of 1992.

The Secret Service had their hands full trying to secure the outdoor event. Falkenberg said, “People are genuinely excited when they meet someone famous. What you’re looking for is the person who was distant, who was completely inside of himself. That’s the person who was planning something.”

Everything was normal until it wasn’t. Then clutch happened again. President Clinton drifted off the line to shake more hands during the event and he came upon one guy who was shaking his hand for more than a few seconds and Falkenberg heard Clinton say “he won’t let go.”

In that moment Falkenberg sprung into action and the overzealous supporter was writhing on the ground. Clinton was shunted into a waiting SUV and it was all over in roughly 10 seconds.

During the interview for his book, Sullivan asked Falkenberg what happened to the “fan.” Falkenberg paused and looked a Sullivan for what he described as a near-eternity: “I don’t know. I didn’t care. My job was to get the protectee out of there.”

Sullivan later found out that in one motion, Falkenberg grabbed the man’s forearm and pulled his thumb back with such force that the man collapsed, his thumb dislocated, and his radius bone had been fractured. All in 4 seconds…

Clutch is a function of training and preparation. Even if you are a perennial choker, with training your can become clutch. What happened with Agent Falkenberg was not random. Even The Art of War has something on Clutch; it states that “a victorious warrior first wins, and then seeks battle.” Are you a choker, or do you go home and TK the prom queen?

What took place with agent Falkenberg had been rehearsed for months upon months, hours and hours and hours. Falkenberg had practiced so long that in the event of hearing President Clinton say “he won’t let go,” his actions were summoned instinctively. Through vigorous training and practice they had become second nature to him. There was nothing to think about. There was nothing to decide. Falkenberg just followed his model – a discretionary model mind you.

I think it’s because such an Agent can act so definitively with “shock and awe” that we’re bewildered on some level because of the precision and speed. Agent Falkenberg was only a second-year agent back in 1992 while protecting so-to-be President-elect Clinton. He was 25 at the time. He was clutch.

10 Secret Service Survival Tips for Travelers

By MONTE BURKE

During the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, a woman named Geraldine Larkin was browsing a bookstore near the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower when she heard what she thought were fireworks. Instead of immediately seeking shelter, she wandered back to the hotel. Some alert hotel patrons grabbed her and took her to the hotel’s restaurant, which they barricaded with a piano, then turned off the lights.

Larkin survived the attacks thanks to the quick thinking of a few folks. Some 175 others weren’t as lucky.

While it is impossible to predict a terrorist attack, taking some precautions and preparing oneself should be a priority for all travelers, says Christopher Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent who now runs Insite Security, a risk management and security consulting firm that services corporations and high-net worth families.

With Europe under an unprecedented terror alert, the U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert, warning of potential terrorist attacks. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Europe and the U.S. are concerned that terrorists have targeted airports, hotels and tourist attractions for attacks in the mold of those that took place in Mumbai, where 175 people were killed and 300 wounded by terrorists using small and relatively low-tech explosives and guns.

If you have to travel to Europe, you can take some steps to minimize your risk, says Falkenberg. His advice, he says, “is relevant for everyone traveling, from the backpacker to the CEO.” (Full disclosure: Christopher Falkenberg is the husband of Forbes editorial counsel, Kai Falkenberg.)

Airports: Safety starts at the airport, which Falkenberg says is a dangerous place. Most attacks at airports happen in the unsecured area outside of security. Falkenberg’s advice is to get the airport, check in, then get past security as soon as possible. “Duty-free shopping on the unsecured side is not worth it,” he says. The “pre-security” parts of airports have been mentioned as possible targets in the European terror alert.

Luggage: Falkenberg also advises that people secure their luggage with plastic ties. Transportation security generally frowns at locks, but will allow ties. The ties serve two purposes: 1) baggage thieves generally prey on luggage that’s the easiest to enter and 2) a broken tie lets you know that someone has rummaged around in there.

Ground Transportation: Also of utmost importance, Falkenberg says, is “nailing down your ground transportation.” Travelers are most vulnerable when traveling by car, bus or train. Falkenberg points out that in the history of U.S. presidential assassinations, only one president (Abraham Lincoln) was not traveling when he was assassinated.

Know exactly who is meeting you when you arrive at the airport. Have a photo of the driver if possible, and have the driver use a pseudonym for you and not your last name when holding up a placard. When you walk to the car or taxi, put away your phone and be aware of your surroundings.

Hotels: Falkenberg also suggests that travelers choose hotels wisely. He suggests avoiding international chains or high-profile hotels (like the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower in Mumbai). “An attacker will choose the most high-profile place,” says Falkenberg. Stay at a local hotel instead.

Choose your room wisely, as well. Get one that you can easily get out of. Falkenberg suggests a room between the 2^nd and 7^th floors, since most fire department ladders do not reach any higher than that. Also, get a room that faces a courtyard and not the front entrance, which is more exposed to car bombs. Do a walk-through of all potential exits.

Flashlights: Always carry one, wherever you go. “This can be your most valuable escape tool,” says Falkenberg. You can get out of a blacked-out hotel. You can use one to momentarily disorient an attacker. Falkenberg recommends one that uses lithium batteries.”Flashlights are legal everywhere and the TSA won’t hassle you,” he says.

Visualize your response: This might be the most important tip. Airplane crashes, hostage situations and terrorist attacks are “so far removed from our everyday life, that people freeze and don’t make rational decisions,” says Falkenberg. “During the Mumbai attacks, people who didn’t believe the sound they were hearing was indeed gunshots were vulnerable. The people who put time and distance between themselves and the shooters had a better chance at surviving.” In a hotel, plan your escape route. In an airplane, listen to the safety instructions, identify the exits and visualize a plan of escape. “People who read the safety cards and plan ahead have a better chance of survival,” he says.