About
I write about security risk from inside the operational reality of it — what organizations are actually able to do, what they are structurally unable to do, and the distance between a policy decision and the people who have to make it work.
That view comes from more than twenty-five years in national security. I have spent the last two decades as a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI in counterterrorism and counterintelligence: assessing threat credibility in ambiguous conditions, leading a nationally distributed team of agents, and running operations coordinated across the U.S. intelligence community and with foreign government partners. Before that I served as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force, where I established and ran a forward operating base supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
A good deal of that work turned out to be less about investigation than about capacity. I built a counterterrorism training curriculum and governance framework that was adopted across all 52 FBI field offices. I stood up a six-person counter-threat team from concept — structure, selection criteria, operating procedures, funding, training — in anticipation of a threat that had not fully materialized yet. I led a technology modernization program that became the operational standard enterprise-wide. Each time, the pattern was the same: the organization already knew it had a problem, and nobody’s full-time job was to own it.
That is the argument this site keeps returning to. The binding constraint in security is rarely knowledge. It is capacity — whether anyone is positioned, funded, and accountable for acting on what is already known. The distance between knowing and being able to act is where most security failures actually live.
I founded and run a nonprofit youth soccer academy serving more than eighty families. My current focus is emerging risk on two fronts: the security implications of AI systems, and how state adversaries — Iran, China, Russia — actually operate against Western institutions. Most of the writing here comes from one or the other.