Glossary.

The work done at a hotel and a venue before a team arrives: selecting meeting space, assigning the coaches' floor, controlling keys, identifying the hotel's security contact and inspecting the rooms that matter. Borrowed from protective work, where an advance team precedes the principal. The travel security advance.

A short written record produced after a threat or incident: what happened, what was done, what held and what did not, and the changes recommended. Written for the department, in a form it can hand to counsel.

The firm's five-day examination of how a program actually operates across six areas: facilities, travel, devices and information, people and practice, athlete exposure, and incident response. It produces a prioritized report, not a sales document. The program security assessment.

The one person at the department named in the engagement letter to receive reports and findings. Normally the athletic director or chief of staff. Nothing is reported to anyone else unless the letter says so.

The practice of identifying and frustrating other people's efforts to collect information about you. In a football program: protecting signals, the game plan, personnel decisions and injuries from a rival who is trying to learn them. Not the same as intelligence, which is collecting information about others, and which the firm does not do on a client's behalf.

The written rules for the telephones and tablets that carry a program's plan: passcodes, lock-screen previews, cloud backups, group messages, hotel networks, remote wipe, and whom to call when a device is lost. Issued as a one-page checklist every staff member completes and keeps.

Assembling and publishing a person's private information, such as an address, a telephone number or family details, usually to invite harassment. The information is rarely secret; it is gathered from data brokers, public records and the posts of people around the target. On the threat landscape.

The document that governs every engagement: who the client contact is, the scope, what the firm does and does not do, what the department provides, how reports are written and delivered, and which state licenses apply. The department's counsel receives it before any work begins. What it states.

What a motivated stranger could learn or reach. A program's exposure is its information and its rooms; an athlete's exposure is what is publicly findable about him. An exposure check is a timed search of public sources, conducted as a stranger would conduct it.

The tiers of Division I football. The Power Four conferences hold the largest budgets. The Group of Five conferences compete in the same subdivision with smaller ones. The Football Championship Subdivision, FCS, holds its own playoff. The firm is structured and priced for the Group of Five and FCS first.

One entry in an assessment report: what was found, why it matters, the evidence, a severity, the remedy, who owns it and what it costs. A finding without a remedy is an observation and is recorded separately. Reports contain between fourteen and thirty findings.

The sixty minutes after an athlete receives a threat, when most of the harm from sextortion and harassment is done or prevented. The firm's wallet card states what to do in five lines. The card.

An examination of how information left a building: who had access, by what process, and which habits made it possible. Conducted through interviews and document review. Not an investigation of any individual, and never surveillance of staff.

Name, image and likeness: the right of a college athlete to be paid for the commercial use of his identity. It made athletes worth approaching by fraudulent agents, fictitious brands and impersonators, and it is the reason the firm's athlete work exists.

Often shortened to OPSEC. The discipline of denying an adversary the small pieces of information that, assembled, reveal an intention: a travel itinerary, a whiteboard in the background of a photograph, a staff member's comment at dinner. Most of staff tradecraft is operational security reduced to habits.

The person who leads the firm and does the work. In protective work the word means the person being protected; on this site it means the person a department deals with, because there is no one else.

A season-long arrangement that combines the firm's engagements with a response line answered within the hour. It follows the football calendar: the substantial work falls before camp and before the postseason. What a season retainer includes.

Extortion that threatens to publish intimate images unless the victim pays. Against athletes it is conducted at volume by organized groups through false social-media accounts, and it moves from first contact to threat within days. Payment never ends it. The first hour after a sextortion message.

An NCAA penalty attached to an individual rather than an institution. Any school that wishes to employ the person during the period of the order must appear before the Committee on Infractions and show cause why it should not be penalized for doing so. A ten-year order was imposed in the first sign-stealing case brought to a decision.

Learning an opponent's signals in order to anticipate its plays. Decoding signals from the field during a game is a part of the sport; in-person scouting of future opponents and the use of recording equipment are prohibited by NCAA rule. The firm's interest is in making a program's signals expensive to steal by any method.

The popular term for a technical surveillance countermeasures inspection. The firm uses the term reluctantly, because it suggests a result the inspection cannot promise. See technical surveillance countermeasures.

Audio, images or video generated or altered by software to show a person saying or doing something they did not. Against athletes it appears as fabricated clips circulated before a game and as manufactured intimate images used for extortion.

The practical techniques of intelligence and security work, as distinct from its theory. The firm teaches coaching staffs the parts of it that a staff will actually practice during a season, in a half-day or full-day session. Staff tradecraft and counterintelligence awareness.

Abbreviated TSCM. The inspection of a room for devices that listen, watch, track or transmit, using radio-frequency, optical, thermal and physical methods. A proper report states which instruments were used and what each cannot detect, because no instrument detects everything. What a sweep can and cannot find.

A program's principal planning room, used for personnel decisions, recruiting boards and the weekly installation of the game plan. Usually the most sensitive room in the building and frequently the one with the most casual access.