At a 2024 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle fired at least eight times before Secret Service agents killed him.[1] The shooter hit former president Donald Trump, wounding his ear. He also murdered a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter.[2] Later, law enforcement searching the gunman’s van found explosives and a detonator.[3]
This tragedy illustrates why a comprehensive security plan for high-profile events is critical for protecting VIPs, guests, and the venue itself. In a new e-book, Babel Street discusses how open-source intelligence (OSINT) can help in this effort.
OSINT and the event security landscape
OSINT is intelligence gleaned from the processing and analysis of publicly available and commercially available information (PAI/CAI). Through social media monitoring, semantic understanding, name matching, and other capabilities, OSINT technologies can help law enforcement, corporate security teams, private security firms, and security consultants better identify and prevent threats to high-profile events. These events include everything from campaign rallies to the Olympics, from G20 Summits to pop concerts.
Today’s event-security professionals are wary of threats of terrorism, mass shootings, violent protests, and other crimes. They know they must employ every available tool to defend event guests, venues, and of course, “stars” — or the corporate executives, political leaders, athletes, celebrities, and other VIPs people gather to see. They must provide this protection at three points on the timeline: before, during, and after the event. Increasingly, they find that OSINT can help.
Before the event, security professionals use OSINT to monitor social media, online forums, news outlets, and other sites for indications of planned attacks or disruptive behavior targeting specific events, venues, or populations. OSINT solutions can also help with location-specific concerns. Security teams can search for publicly available information on an event location – floor plans, vehicle access pathways, loading docks that provide ingress and egress. If this type of information could be used to gain access to a venue by someone planning an attack, security teams should factor that knowledge into their response plans.
When developing VIP security strategies before an event, professionals can use OSINT to protect against general threats (the uncertainties inherent in traveling to a politically unstable country, for example, or the risk associated with traveling to a geographic region prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, or other natural disasters). OSINT can also safeguard VIPs against more targeted risks. The head of an oil company may face protests from environmentalists. A splinter group associated with a political party may loudly and violently decry what it perceives as the evils wrought by the leader of another political party. OSINT solutions can help security professionals spot and avoid these threats.
Examining social media during high-profile happenings can help protect guests and venues through crowd monitoring — providing insights into the mood of guests, who often post during the game, meeting, or concert. This information can help security teams anticipate crowd management challenges and adjust security and response plans accordingly.
In addition, attendees may spot and post about signs of trouble even before security professionals become aware of them. At a major event in 2023, one patron Tweeted, “If you are in the [Major City] arena please be careful! This guy is making claims of a mass shooting!”[4] Social media monitoring can alert law enforcement and security to posts like these. This type of OSINT not only protects the guests and venue, but VIPs. A bomb placed in a concert venue can just as easily kill the singer as the guest in seat 16B.
Protection should continue after the event. Perhaps fearing security at the venue itself, terrorists and others may think the parking structure is the perfect spot to place a bomb, or to stage a mass shooting. An argument brewing among opposing fans at a soccer match may spill over into violence outside the arena. Combining OSINT with local knowledge of crime patterns can help law enforcement and security professionals spot spill-over violence and stop these crimes. VIP protection should also continue post-event. The same events that threaten VIPs on their way to an event threaten them on their way home.
How Babel Street can help
The Babel Street AI-powered ecosystem delivers advanced data and analytics solutions that transform diverse data sources into actionable insights. The Babel Street Insights OSINT solution provides persistent searches of thousands of sources of PAI and CAI. To provide security professionals and law enforcement with the insight needed to secure venues, events, and VIPs, our technology scours data sources published in more than 200 languages. It then translates results into the user’s language of choice. Information sources include more than a billion top-level domains, commercially available sources, and real-world interactions generated on chats, social media posts, online comments, and message boards.
Insights further enhances security through searches of the deep and dark web — or websites that are inaccessible by standard search engines. Because the nature of the tools used to access the dark web ensure anonymity, it is a hotbed of illegal activity. Babel Street can help law enforcement and security professionals better analyze this hidden web data for insights into the type of information that indicates potential criminal activity aimed at venues, guests, or VIPs. In doing so, Babel Street technology can help law enforcement and security professionals better secure high-profile events.
Want to learn more about OSINT and how Babel Street Insights works to produce it? Read our ebook.
End Notes
1. Levenson, Michael, “What We Know About the Assassination Attempt Against Trump,” The New York Times, July 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/us/politics/shooting-trump-rally.html
2. Ibid
3. Eberhart, Chris, “Police comb through Thomas Matthew Crooks’ van that hid explosives, video shows,” Fox News, July 2024, https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-comb-through-thomas-matthew-crooks-van-hid-explosives-video-shows
4. Babel Street Insights, 2023
