What Goes Into Protecting a Public Figure?

It’s no secret that threats against U.S. government officials at every level and in every branch are at ominous highs. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently stunned Washington by announcing she would leave Congress in January, a year before her term ends, has cited a wave of threats against her. She’s far from the first to have such complaints.

We here at Decision Points decided to dig into the problem by talking to a veteran security expert, Don Aviv, who is the CEO of Interfor International. He “supports Chief Security Officers and General Counsel of some of the leading corporations, financial institutions and family offices around the world,” according to its website.

House members are getting $10,000 per month for security (soon to increase to $20,000). What does that buy you?

Can buy you a lot, or can buy you very little. It really depends on how you spend that money – the same thing with everything in government, right? I assume they’re covering a combination of electronic security coverage, so think home alarms. It’s probably also covering Ubers and transportation.

In extreme circumstances, it’d be armed security. But for members of Congress, they get the Capitol Police. So if there’s a viable threat against the member of Congress, the Capitol Police step in and will provide coverage.

If it was an executive, or, you know, a CEO and someone not affiliated with government, it would likely be armed security.

Is the approach different if the person calling you for help is a celebrity versus a CEO versus a lawmaker?

We handle all three routinely. But in this day and age the unifying factor is social media – the rise of adversarial social media and polarized politics. What we really care about most is what’s happening in digital media. Online threats.

There is a significant erosion of privacy in this day and age, and it’s driving the threats, driving exposure, so that’s what really we focus on.

But everything is predicated on the threat: Who is the threat? Where’s the threat coming from? And how do you mitigate that threat? What you actually put in place could be different depending on whether it’s a celebrity, a CEO or a member of Congress.

So you get a call from a member of Congress saying they’ve been getting threats of violence and they want your help. What’s step one?

To be perfectly clear, they would probably call the FBI first, or the Capitol Police, and the Capitol Police would then turn that into a case with the Department of Justice.

But in the private sector, we look to see where the threats are coming from. Is this a bot farm funded by Russia? Or is this someone who’s been tweeting who lives across the street from the member of Congress and has a long history of violence and volatile rhetoric, and maybe even a gun permit? Those are the things we look at. We try to always match and identify where the threats are coming from, how they’re becoming viral. And if we could figure that out, we’re 80% of the way there.

You must have some good stories. You want to share one?

Someone was posting about assassinating an A-list celebrity who was going to be performing – a musician, female musician, you know the name very well, household name, and she was going to be performing at a specific venue.

And this person was sending messages and posting in the fan group how they would “pull a John Lennon” on this celebrity. We had to 1) determine the veracity of the threat, 2) figure out how serious of a threat this is, and 3) figure out who it was.

So it took a tremendous amount of investigative work, but in the end, we communicated with the individual and convinced him that he had won a backstage pass and a meet-and-greet to meet the celebrity, but he had to show up at Gate A at 8 p.m.

He showed up at 8 p.m. with an inert grenade he ordered online and a giant knife and a firearm and really planning on doing harm to this celebrity. So sometimes it’s about being proactive and not reactive, and trying to be aggressive or social engineer the bad actors.