Firestorm Featured in WIRED Magazine – Threat Awareness and Predictive Intelligence

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Firestorm is pleased to have been included in a recent article on Threat Awareness published in WIRED Magazine, and featuring one of our proactive Michigan school district clients, Superintendent Blake Prewitt of Lakeview School District, and our own Hart Brown, COO.Superintendent Blake Prewitt of Lakeview School District

As Lakeview District Schools attest, robust violence prevention programs incorporate a number of elements and this includes threat detection capabilities – Predictive Intelligence – related to behaviors of concern.

Blake Prewitt, superintendent of Lakeview school district in Battle Creek, Michigan, says he typically wakes up each morning to twenty new emails from a social media monitoring system the district activated earlier this year. It uses keywords and machine learning algorithms to flag public posts on Twitter and other networks that contain language or images that may suggest conflict or violence, and tag or mention district schools or communities.

In recent months the alert emails have included an attempted abduction outside one school—Prewitt checked if the school’s security cameras could aid police—and a comment about dress code from a student’s relative—district staff contacted the family. Prewitt says the alerts help him keep his 4,000 students and 500 staff safe. “If someone posts something threatening to someone else, we can contact the families and work with the students before it gets to the point of a fight happening in school,” he says.

While behaviors of concern are not limited to only shared, social or technology-based interactions, these types of applications do allow us early warning in a way that did not exist in past decades. Predictive Intelligence then, includes the analysis of publicly shared, aggregate and individual user-driven social intelligence in addition to live, face-to-face observations. You can read the full WIRED article here and learn more about all of the components of a robust program at sharetheformula.com 

Related:

Learn about Threat Intelligence for Business

Learn about Threat Intelligence for Schools

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