Protective Intelligence: Predictive. Timely. Actionable

In this section Chris establishes some guard rails to help us understand Protective Intelligence. It is: proactive, supportive and actionable. It is not secretive, it is not a newsfeed, and it’s not a crystal ball. Protective Intelligence provides critical support for your protective operations.

Protective Intelligence may be collected, analyzed, and implemented to support strategic, operational, or tactical risk mitigation. From shaping enterprise-level policies and strategic business decisions, to understanding the conditions and variables that affect your daily operations on the grand, this section will provide clarity on how Protective Intelligence impacts the protective operations at every level.

In this section, Chris explains each step in the intelligence cycle:
Identify – What information is critical to operations? (Who, what, how…)
Collect – Information associated to relevant people, places, things
Analyze – Timeliness, accuracy and relevance
Disseminate – Intelligence must be shared to be effective.
Evaluate – Post-operation debrief is critical to understand impact.
(Repeat)

Moving beyond the questions of who, what, where, when, how, and why, the next variables to consider are: Geography, weather, political impacts (such as protest activity), competition (cyber/tech threats), and infrastructure (power grid/web…)

Now that we have a general understanding of what Protective Intelligence is and how it’s used to support EP operations, we will now get practical about how intelligence is sourced and the various tools and applications intelligence analysts utilize in the collection of information. Human, imaging, signals, and open source intelligence are all examples of sources for gathering data.

Once data has been collected, evaluated and sorted, we now begin the process of analyzing the information so it can be put into context. Analysis is where data is transformed into intelligence. Analysts can then disseminate intel so that it can be utilized to inform tactical, operations, and strategic decision making at every level.

How do we know when we are hitting the mark? In this section, we evaluate whether or not we are effectively and efficiently meeting our operational intelligence objectives. By gathering feedback, conducting post-mission briefs, and using pattern recognition, we can begin to understand the on-the-ground impact our Protective Intelligence is having in the real world.

As the PI and EP teams continue developing their professional rapport, intel and operations begin speaking the same language and working from the same sheet of music. The teams can now properly categorize intelligence so that appropriate action may be taken.
Critical – Requires immediate action (Call me now)
Priority – Urgent and can impact us (Text message)
Routine – Advisory notification but can wait

As we wrap things up, we look back at this course and review some key take-aways:
The 5 “W’s +H” – Who, what, when, where, why, and how
What PI is, what it does, how it applies, and what is its value.
How Protective Intelligence informs courses of action to mitigate risk
and maximizes assets to support protective operations.