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Reposted from Sarasota Magazine
The Sarasota artist colony of painters and writers who flourished here in the ’50s and ’60s is long gone, and with it a remarkable group of men and women. These people set the tone of the town and did it so well that, today, the arts remain as central to Sarasota’s identity as its beaches. There may be one or two of these individuals left, but, as a group, they are fading into history.
Some ended up world famous. Syd Solomon’s paintings are in most major museums, John D. MacDonald is credited with creating modern crime fiction and MacKinlay Kantor’s story The Best Years of Our Lives is firmly embedded in our national psyche due to the classic movie based on it. Burl Ives, meanwhile, remains integral to the Christmas season thanks to his “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” And Julio De Diego, one of the more interesting of the painters, married Gypsy Rose Lee, the most famous stripper in the world, and spent the next several years managing her burlesque show.
And then there was Ben Stahl. In his heyday, he was one of the most famous Sarasota artists of all. One of the country’s top illustrators, he was so good he could almost cross the line into fine art. He had an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide and was always trying something new and potentially profitable. He set out to write a novel and it became a bestseller and then a Disney movie. He co-founded the Famous Artists School with his pal Norman Rockwell. He even opened his own museum, the Museum of the Cross, in which he exhibited a series of his own paintings depicting the stations of the cross—the final hours of Jesus’ life.
For three years in the late ’60s, the museum was one of the town’s major tourist attractions. Then, on April 16, 1969, it became something else—the scene of Sarasota’s most baffling mystery.
When Ben and Ella Stahl moved to Sarasota in 1953, the town had already acquired an arty reputation. The stage had been set early. Bertha Palmer had brought her favorite Monet down to hang over her fireplace at the Oaks and John Ringling’s art collection, both eccentric and eclectic, opened to the public in 1936.
Artists like Ben moved here for the simplest of reasons. It was a great place to work. The weather was beautiful, as were the colors of the Gulf and the tropical vegetation. Life here was also relatively cheap, there were many kindred spirits and there was even the circus to liven things up. People still talk about the social life back in those days, and some of the tales get quite racy. The alpha male artist or writer with an inflated ego and a drinking problem—we had our share.
Ben was not like that. I knew him during the last year of his life, and found him charming and great company, yet always a little reserved. Unlike most of the artists, he didn’t talk much about himself. He was the sort of person who, when he left the room, everybody started talking about him.
There was a lot to talk about. He had been one of the top illustrators in the country at a time when illustrators were in high demand. It was the golden age of magazines, and it was men (they were invariably men) like Ben who drew the illustrations that accompanied the articles and the ads. Ben illustrated more than 750 stories and covers for the Saturday Evening Post, the gold standard of 1950s mainstream media.
And it wasn’t just the Post. His work also appeared in Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s and more. He even drew Coca-Cola ads. He was the guy who got the plum assignments. Esquire hired him to do 12 portraits of beautiful young girls, each one typical of her European country.
He had his own style, or rather a style that pulled from the work of many famous artists—a little Renoir, a little Degas, a little Picasso and, when he was getting serious, a little El Greco. But he had a happy view of life. His favorite subject was a voluptuous nude, blissfully plump and smiling. I happen to know, because I own one. I won it from him in a poker game.
Of course, the Saturday Evening Post would only publish so many nudes, so he had other specialties. He had an affinity for religious paintings, very dramatic in color and composition, with figures posed to suggest the Old Masters. But he could please anybody. Even the Air Force, which hired him to do a series of paintings for their academy in Colorado Springs. His work even hangs in the Pentagon.
Ben became a leader in Sarasota’s artist colony, perhaps the most vocal. “He was a domineering presence in the community,” wrote Marcia Corbino, “a catalyst who was stimulated by obstacles.” He was always advocating for increased funding for the arts and getting into spats with politicians. He raised a terrible ruckus when members of the Florida Legislature refused to pay him for a portrait they commissioned of Gov. Claude Kirk.
His talent was not limited to painting. After an argument with John D. MacDonald about which was more difficult, writing or painting, he set out to write a novel. How hard could it be? The result was Blackbeard’s Ghost.
And, since he happened to have an appointment in California, he decided that while there he should talk to Walt Disney about his book, as yet unpublished. Walt was intrigued by this person from Florida who somehow managed to get his phone number and invited him to lunch at his studio. Three days later, Walt bought the movie rights and William Morrow called, looking to publish the novel. The book won prizes and the movie was a success. Everybody was pleased, except Ben, who told people, “The movie was horrible.”
The reason for Ben’s trip to Los Angeles was just as unlikely and just as thrilling. He was to paint a nude portrait of Ursula Andress—the original Bond girl—that would hang over the bar in a movie called 4 for Texas, also starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Anita Ekberg. Stahl’s work was often used for movie publicity. He did a series of paintings to promote Ben-Hur in 1959.
The Stahls had four children, whom many old timers around town remember from high school. The family was well known for their lavish home. It was designed by Sarasota School architect Victor Lundy and is credited with being the first of the Siesta Key showplaces. Ben did his best to adjust to modernism, but all those glass walls bothered him. There was nowhere to hang paintings. “It took us 10 years to rework it and make it livable,” he complained.
Ben had been somewhat of a child prodigy himself. His grandmother saw his talent early and took him to museums. But he had no formal education and never went to art school. At 16, he began working at a commercial art studio. That same year, he placed a watercolor in a prestigious exhibit.
To Ben, the role of the artist was not that of a tortured soul but rather an explainer, a guide. The artist was there to entertain, delight and inspire. It was this attitude that made him such a great teacher. Practically all the visual artists in the colony taught. Sarasota in the ’50s was clogged with art schools. There was Syd Solomon’s school, the Hartman school, Hilton Leech’s school, Jerry Farnsworth and Helen Sawyer’s school—they were everywhere.
Continue Reading the Original Post
Reposted from BBC News
A cyber attack is stopping a museum from accessing its artefact database more than a year after the initial breach.
Benefit payments, planning applications and house sales were all delayed when Gloucester City Council was hit by hackers in 2021.
A council report has now revealed the Museum of Gloucester is still being affected by the cyber incident.
The museum's database had been used to create exhibitions at the venue.
Council officers first became aware their systems had been compromised on 20 December 2021.
Malware, which is software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage or gain unauthorised access to a computer, had made it onto their systems.
The harmful software was embedded in an email which had been sent to a council officer, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
Gloucester City Council has had to rebuild all of its servers as a result of the attack, which has been linked to Russian hackers.
The latest estimate suggests the bill to the taxpayer is approaching the £1m mark.
Council officers said the museum's access to the collection database was "rather fundamental".
Opposition leader Jeremy Hilton said: "It is very worrying that in a council report it was mentioned that the museum services had not had access to its collections database, hindering important investigation into the city's historic monuments.
"I hope this important information isn't lost forever or that officers will not have to spend their valuable time inputting data all over again."
Culture and leisure cabinet member Andy Lewis said he believed no records had been lost.
See Original Post
Reposted from Artnet News
Dutch police have identified the culprits behind a brazen heist at last year’s edition of the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, as members of the so-called Pink Panther Gang, a notorious criminal organization from the Balkans that has been active since 2001.
“Sources surrounding the investigation” have fingered the Panthers in the crime, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported, though the crime remains unresolved beyond the connection to the gang. The news is a vindication for the Dutch detective Arthur Brand, known for his work recovering stolen artworks and antiquities, who voiced his suspicions that the gang was involved in the weeks after the June 2022 heist.
The Pink Panthers are known for their bold daylight robberies, posing as well-dressed customers and then acting with precision to quickly make off with millions in stolen jewels. Other thefts have involved crashing cars into buildings.
The gang got their name after a 2003 robbery at London’s Graff Jewelers that the Daily Mail compared to the 1975 Inspector Clouseau film The Return of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers—echoing a scene from the movie, police found one of the stolen diamond rings hidden inside a jar of face cream.
The $33 million caper was, at the time, the largest diamond heist in British history, with the thieves making off with 47 pieces of jewelry. A decade ago, the Guardian estimated that the Panthers had made off with €330 million ($422.5 million) in stolen diamonds and jewels over the course of some 341 thefts. The size of the gang has been estimated at 200 to 300 operatives, overseen by a core group of 30-or-so thieves.
Reposted from Art Review
On 24 February, museum employees at the Schwules Museum in Berlin discovered evidence of an attack on the institution’s building. Two window panes, the illuminated sign with the museum’s name, and a work of art hanging in front of the entrance door were damaged by gunfire. The attack appears to have happened overnight. The Berlin police department have investigated the scene and collected evidence, though the full extent and cost of the damage is yet to be determined.
Now one of the largest LGBTQ museums in the world, the Schwules Museum was founded in 1984 to support the queer community as well as research on queer history, art and activism. This, however, is not the first time the museum has been targeted: in 2020, one of the museum’s window panes was severely damaged by rocks, and in 2016, the window at the reception area was shot in six places with firearms.
‘I think it’s important to state that we don’t know who did this or why’, Ben Miller, historian and board member of the museum, told Dazed Magazine. ‘However, I’m not sure it’s possible to think about this incident without considering the right-wing, anti-queer mobilisation that we’re seeing around the world. And I think it’s fair to say that we are certainly the target of that kind of mobilisation in general.’ Physical attacks aside, the museum has also experienced Neo-Nazi demonstrations as well as regular threats from phone calls and on social media.
According to a statement issued by the museum, the damaged piece of artwork is a part of Elizabeth Sweeney’s the Unrelenting (2022), created for the ongoing exhibition Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, on view through 29 May. The black triangular piece hanging outside the museum references the badges used by the Nazis to label and stigmatise a diverse range of people.
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
When it released its annual report on hate crime statistics late last year, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation faced criticism that a change in the reporting system used vastly underreported data thereby masking a growing problem. The FBI released an update yesterday with more complete data, and it showed the number of hate crime incidents had increased by 11.6 percent.
The report covers crime statistics from 2021. The original report was the first that required the nation’s local law enforcement agencies to report crime statistics using NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System), and many localities were not able to meet the new reporting requirements. As a result, the December 2022 release covered reports from localities representing 65 percent of the U.S. population.
The supplemental report backfills the data by combining the NIBRS data with the previous system of reporting, meaning the supplement covers 91 percent of the U.S. population. As a result, the FBI’s official number of hate crime incidents reported in 2021 jumped from 7,262 in the December report to 10,840 in the revised supplemental information. There were a total of 12,822 victims of hate crime incidents in 2021. (Note: To access the full supplemental report, users must access the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer and access the “Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021” link.)
“Preventing, investigating, and prosecuting hate crimes are top priorities for the Justice Department,” Associate U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a release, “and reporting is key to each of those priorities. The FBI’s supplemental report demonstrates our unwavering commitment to work with our state and local partners to increase reporting and provide a more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.”
The 10,840 incidents broken down by type of bias:
In addition, 310 incidents involved multiple types of bias.
The FBI classified a total of 8,327 incidents as hate crime offenses that involved crimes against people. These incidents broken down by type of offense:
In addition, the FBI classified 19 rapes as hate crimes, as well as 18 murders and 70 additional crimes that fell under an “other” category.
Reposted from Victoria Buzz
An activist advocating for action against the climate crisis has thrown pink paint on the Royal BC Museum’s (RBCM) mammoth exhibit to publicly ‘kickstart’ a new protest campaign.
A video was posted to Twitter by On2Ottawa which is the official account for the new campaign wishing to call all Canadians to rally and march on Ottawa to remind political leaders of the ongoing climate crisis if action is not taken.
“If the government does not enact the citizen’s assembly to tackle the climate and ecological crisis in the next one to two years, then we will be travelling to Ottawa to demand one,” said the woman identified as ‘Laura,’ who spread paint on the mammoth.
“At 11 a.m. today an incident took place in which Woolly, the iconic and beloved Royal BC Museum mammoth, was defaced by activists and pink paint was applied to his tusks,” RBCM spokesperson Samantha Rich said in a media statement to Victoria Buzz
“Museum security staff safely reprimanded those involved, and called Victoria Police Department who quickly arrived on the scene and took the activists into custody.”
“Museum staff members from the exhibitions and conservation teams successfully cleaned off the water-soluble paint from the entire diorama.”
“There was no permanent damage to Woolly, who has been a favourite for visitors of the museum for over 40 years, and the exhibition was reopened within 90 minutes.”
“Thanks to a bit of elbow grease, he’s back to his old self. It was helpful that the paint was mainly just on his tusks,” added Rich.
VicPD say they’ve arrested three suspects in connection with the vandalism of the iconic wooly mammoth. Their investigation is ongoing.
Prior to this video, Laura has been featured in another On2Ottawa video explaining why she believes that climate action must be taken by federal government entities.
On2Ottawa is concerned that with rising temperatures, food will become increasingly more difficult to produce as populations grow, frequency of natural disasters will increase and eventually mass migrations will have to take place because more regions will become uninhabitable.
“All this pressure will result in societal collapse and we will not know life as we know it right now,” said Laura in the previous video. “We need drastic change as soon as possible.”
Laura and On2Ottawa say they believe that society as a whole has one to two years to sort this out before our collapse.
The On2Ottawa movement hopes to unite all climate action causes and endeavours to demand a people’s assembly in lieu of our current government.
Rather than democratically voting in politicians, a people’s assembly in On2Ottawa’s vision would see random citizens from across Canada selected and educated on what are the most pressing issues to society as we know it. They would replace our current administration.
Some stories hit harder than others. Whether it’s the news that a grandfather was scammed out of his retirement fund, or a child was the victim of a crime, or civil unrest is displacing thousands of people and putting them at risk of starvation, security professionals and investigators are often confronted by heart-wrenching scenarios. While many security practitioners and analysts can maintain objectivity and a professional distance from these tales of woe, it only takes one incident that resonates to tip even the most practiced professionals into a state of stress and, potentially, trauma.
This is because trauma—including indirect trauma, where the victim is exposed to others’ traumatic incidents and stories—is cumulative, and repeated exposure to troubling situations and news can wear down a person’s natural emotional resilience, says Diana Concannon, PCI, a forensic psychologist and dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University.
Indirect trauma changes a person’s inner worldview as a result of bonding with a victim (even one you have never met) over his or her traumatic experience, Concannon says. This could negatively distort a person’s worldview, convincing them to believe that people will all behave badly, or criminal activity is a default, or significant violent incidents are inevitable. It could be a result of secondary trauma—where the effect is immediate in response to a single event—or vicarious trauma, which builds up gradually. The path to indirect trauma is rarely linear, she notes, but sometimes a particular incident strikes a chord that makes it easier to empathize and relate with a victim (such as if the victim looks like your grandma or if a child the same age as yours is injured), potentially causing a spontaneous reaction.
According to the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), a division of the U.S. Department of Justice, “Vicarious trauma is an occupational challenge for people working and volunteering in the fields of victim services, law enforcement, emergency medical services, fire services, and other allied professions, due to their continuous exposure to victims of trauma and violence. This work-related trauma exposure can occur from such experiences as listening to individual clients recount their victimization; looking at videos of exploited children; reviewing case files; hearing about or responding to the aftermath of violence and other traumatic events day after day; and responding to mass violence incidents that have resulted in numerous injuries and deaths.”
People can experience vicarious trauma in a number of ways, from negative reactions (psychosocial symptoms, including critical incident stress or compassion fatigue) to neutral ways (a sign that an individual is managing traumatic material effectively, not that it has no effect) to positive reactions. This latter response is also called vicarious resilience, a state in which the individual “may draw inspiration from a victim’s resilience that strengthens their own mental and emotional fortitude,” the OVC said.
People who work with survivors of trauma or violence are at risk of being negatively impacted by vicarious trauma, and some factors make people more susceptible, including prior traumatic experiences, social isolation, a tendency to avoid feelings, lack of preparation or supervision at work, being newer or less experienced at the job, constant and intense exposure to trauma with little or no variation in work tasks, and a lack of effective and supportive processes for discussing traumatic content. The Vicarious Trauma Toolkit from the OVC noted that people in professions that help others—such as first responders, doctors, social workers, therapists, and victim services professionals—are at high risk of vicarious trauma.
According to compassion fatigue expert Francoise Mathieu’s 2011 book, The Compassion Fatigue Workbook, between 40 and 85 percent of “helping professionals” develop vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, or high rates of traumatic symptoms, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“It’s really helpful for any managers in the security space to know that when we are dealing with someone who may be diagnosed with PTSD, it’s often not what the Hollywood script looks like,” says Marisa Randazzo, executive director of threat management at Ontic and former chief research psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service. “In a few cases, we see someone who is startled, who is having flashbacks or feels they are living under constant threat, but oftentimes what we see instead is something that is lower level but a lot more chronic.”
In cases that Randazzo has worked throughout her career, security professionals operating with PTSD exhibited symptoms that are not the stereotypical image of traumatization but were more subtle: a lot of sick leave, increased physical ailments, or sleep disruption. “People would wrestle with these symptoms for years,” she says.
While some of the behaviors and symptoms may be similar, vicarious trauma and resulting compassion fatigue is different from burnout. Burnout is the result of broader, unrelenting stressors over a long period of time—such as an unsupportive workplace, long stretches of stress with few breaks, or an unfair culture—that affects energy levels, engagement with work, and personal fulfillment. In comparison, vicarious trauma is emotionally driven and brought about specifically by the subject matter the person is exposed to, and it brings out out feelings of fear and anxiety that can eventually wear security professionals down and compromise their ability to function well.
Randazzo notes that this has impacted colleagues in the national security space, as well as analysts and investigators. “The pressure to be on the lookout for national security threats can feel overwhelming. And it has a cumulative response, so you may have worked in the field for 10 years with no problem, but all of a sudden feel like you can’t handle the work anymore,” she says.
Security analysts and forensic investigators are at risk here, especially because of the nature of aberrant, extreme, or disturbing material they are exposed to as they search for evidence or data to work with. This can often be the case for analysts digging into extremist content online or for people investigating child abuse, exploitation, or trafficking.
“This—appropriately—is traumatizing to a normal psyche,” Concannon explains. “It is disturbing, and it’s very insidious as to its effect on the psyche. We often think that we can compartmentalize our ability to work with such material, and to a certain extent that is true—we can intellectualize it, we can look at it objectively, and that’s what we have to do. But to think that we are in some way immune or that we can separate ourselves from our emotional body as we’re doing that process is a distortion. We’re still a whole human as we’re looking at this material. Over time, we start to have a distorted worldview, because what we’re exposed to becomes our reality. And if we are constantly exposed to material that is slanted in a particular way, that is showing a side of humanity that is not the most favorable, that is looking at people behaving badly, our perception of the world can start to tilt in such a way so that our expectation is that people generally are going to behave that way. And depending on information we’re sorting through, we can expect people to behave in an especially heinous way.”
While many people may have a high level of resilience against this distortion, it is not invincible, she notes. The rate at which resilience is depleted from vicarious trauma is on a continuum—it’s not a straight line, and it varies by individual. A person’s ability to cope with vicarious trauma and repeated exposure to traumatic material depends on many factors, including personality, background, and the availability (or lack) of supportive social and professional resources.
“None of us are immune to it,” Concannon says. “And also, none of us are doomed by it. We all have the same continuum of resilience and depletion, but how we are calibrated on those continuums are different. That depends on our past experiences, our support systems, and—this is the good news—how we manage our exposure to traumatic intelligence. We have the opportunity to consistently build up our resilience and proactively get in front of any vicarious trauma response.”
Vicarious trauma can affect people on personal and professional levels, according to the OVC, with physical, emotional, behavioral, spiritual, cognitive, and relational ramifications, as well as detrimental effects on job performance, morale, workplace relationships, and behavior. Each individual may experience vicarious trauma differently, so it’s important to evaluate behavior based on deviations from that individual’s baseline personality and actions.
A person facing vicarious trauma might feel more suspicious or have a sense that their ability to control their life is being challenged in some way. They might take more risks, or instead they might behave in an overly controlled way, exhibiting agitation if their control or plans are disrupted, Concannon says.
Vicarious trauma challenges a person’s sense of safety, trust, and control, and it also attacks a person’s self-esteem and sense of intimacy—the desire to get close to other people, she says.
Being knocked off balance in this way can result in hypervigilance, and because security professionals are already prone to high levels of vigilance, Concannon says, managers will need to gauge what is out of the ordinary based on the individual. In addition, symptoms of vicarious trauma can include heightened states of emotional arousal, increased suspicion, increased self-doubt, or isolation.
Over time, these heightened states can result in more disruptions at work—potentially leading to a degraded work culture or even workplace violence. In her work with the U.S. Secret Service, Randazzo found that time and again, when security professionals exhibited concerning behavior, from angry outbursts to concerns over behavior such as threatening language or stalking, “it often had some root in trauma.”
“Much like building a house, an organizational response to vicarious trauma requires vision, commitment, and a methodical approach that starts with laying a foundation and then builds up from there,” according to the Vicarious Trauma Toolkit.
The toolkit offers a blueprint for building a trauma-informed organization (including a handy readiness guide assessment tool), and this can be a good place to start for many organizations. The system enables users to determine areas for improvement and designate stakeholders and champions who can push the organization forward into being more supportive of mental wellness.
What does this look like for security departments and managers on a day-to-day basis? It starts with culture—frequently and frankly discussing mental health challenges, the emotional effect of reviewing challenging material, and resources available to employees, Concannon says.
Because each person’s resilience level is different, managers will need to closely observe their baseline behavior and note any deviations from it. Because security personnel and law enforcement have a tendency for self-reliance, it can be challenging to detect changes in behavior early, so Concannon recommends more group debriefings and investing time and resources in building up camaraderie within teams to preempt isolation and to expand the number of people who could notice signs of trouble.
She also recommends building multidisciplinary teams to help tackle difficult or traumatic cases—having multiple people review the material builds a natural group of confidantes who can discuss the cases together and support each other.
These connected groups of comrades give employees more leeway to speak up if they recognize a team member is having trouble coping with the material or the job, giving management an opportunity to share additional resources and offer support, Concannon adds.
“For syndromes such as vicarious trauma, those who are most likely to see us struggling are those with whom we work,” she says. “Our families expect us to be cranky when we’re cranky, so they don’t see it, but coworkers tend to recognize signs in us a little differently. And if we are already part of a team, there’s more permission to come forward and say something. If we’re not part of a team, there tends to be a resistance to coming forward and saying something because there’s a fear of those statements being misunderstood as criticism.”
Overall, she notes, teams offer a built-in support system that augments what a manager provides directly.
Beyond organizational structures, there are many other actions individual managers can take to be more trauma-minded in the workplace. This starts with the self, Randazzo says.
“First of all, I would encourage every manager in the security space to take a hard look at their own level of functioning, because one of the things we’re seeing is an impaired level of management,” she says. “In the work I did in supporting a number of federal agencies after 9/11, we saw impaired managers in the security space and in companies that had lost physical offices or colleagues… Not necessarily in the immediate aftermath, but in the weeks and months after, we saw increasing levels of impaired management, or managers didn’t realize they weren’t functioning—they wanted to be there for their people, but they weren’t getting things done, weren’t doing the things they said they were going to do, started self-medicating on the job.”
Randazzo recommends working with an executive coach or a mentor in the security field to determine your current capacity as a manager and how to improve individual resilience, or to simply have a decompression session where you discuss current challenges.
“The other piece is for managers to really model self-care,” she adds. There is a false duality in many workspaces where managers espouse the value of self-care but then they never take any time off, which undercuts their message and silently discourages employees from stepping away.
The call for self-care extends to ensuring employees (and managers) are getting adequate sleep, nutrition, socialization, and exercise, Concannon says. In addition, they need to maintain a level of awareness of their saturation points—the quantity and depth of traumatic intelligence they are reviewing—and understand when they need to step away and regroup.
She adds that managers should frequently check in with employees—especially those who are regularly confronted with traumatizing material or victims’ stories—and ensure they are taking those breaks.
“It sounds like such a simple thing, but we’ve found from research on firefighters and emergency workers that just checking in and encouraging breaks, walking out for coffee—those little breaks make a big difference and add up,” Concannon says.
Managers and organizational leaders (including HR directors and others) can also invest in employee assistance programs (EAPs) and let people know about those resources early and often. Additional self-care programs or community resources such as fitness centers or running clubs could also be shared, depending on how they fit into the culture of the team, Concannon says.
Another valuable action managers can take is to continuously contextualize what security professionals and analysts are doing. “The work that most security professionals are doing, especially right now in this time in history, is so important,” Concannon adds. “Keeping that work linked to mission and purpose—the value of it—will help maintain a sense of value, honor, and purpose that is fortifying. It’s a counternarrative to the negativity to some of the material.”
“You are proactively creating the scaffolding for resilience,” she says. “If something acute does develop, then something is in place you can lean on to refortify that resilience. Vicarious trauma is not something that is terminal—it is a depletion beyond one’s resilience. Healing happens when resilience is replenished.”
Reposted from WTHR
Federal authorities say dozens of artifacts stolen in the 1970s from museums in several states and dating back as far as the French and Indian War have been returned to the institutions.
The FBI announced Monday at a ceremony at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia that 50 items had been repatriated to 17 institutions in five states.
The artifacts returned Monday included an 1847 Mississippi rifle stolen from a Mississippi museum, a World War II battlefield pickup pistol belonging to General Omar Bradley — stolen from the U.S. Army War College Museum — and 19th century Pennsylvania rifles stolen from Pennsylvania museums, officials said.
Authorities said Michael Corbett of Newark, Delaware, was indicted in December 2021 for possession of items stolen from museums in the 1970s. In August, he pleaded guilty to possession of stolen items transported interstate and turned over additional stolen items, authorities said.
Officials said the items recovered and now returned to their proper owners included:
Jacqueline Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the Philadelphia office, called it “a rare privilege” to be part of the ceremony returning the stolen items.
“These are artifacts that helped write our national story, with some even predating the country’s birth, and their long absence from public view — hidden away where no one could see or learn from them — was a loss both to society and the historic record,” Maguire said.
Reposted from NPR
Antisemitic text implying that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery was projected onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam this week, the museum announced in a statement.
"The Anne Frank House organisation has learned of this with shock and revulsion," the museum said.
The projection on the house where the Frank family hid during World War II read, "Ann Frank [sic], inventor of the ballpoint pen."
It alludes to a debunked far-right conspiracy theory that the diary was a forgery because part of it was written in ballpoint pen, which were not yet in use while Anne lived. The theory was meticulously and scientifically disproven by the Dutch government, The New York Times reported in 1989.
This false claim is used to question or deny the Holocaust.
Footage of the projection appeared in a hate video in a private Telegram group from the U.S., the museum's statement says.
Dutch police said they are investigating the incident, according to the Associated Press. The museum says it is in touch with authorities and the Amsterdam City Council.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the projection "reprehensible" and said there's "no place for antisemitism in our country" on Twitter.
Anne was a Jewish girl who kept a diary while in hiding with her family for about two years during World War II. The journal chronicled her life, feelings and thoughts.
She died in a concentration camp in 1945.
Her father, Otto, survived the Holocaust and published her diary, which has since sold more than 30 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages.
"The diary of Anne Frank is one of the most important testimonies of the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War," the museum's statement says.
In his landmark TED Talk in 2009, author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek introduced the world to Start with Why, a premise that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. As of this writing, it is the third most watched TED Talk of all time. His book of the same title has sold millions of copies.
In both, Sinek says that every single person and organization on the planet knows what they do, some know how they do it, but few know why they do what they do. By “why,” he asks: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why should anyone care? Why does your team, group, or organization exist? Sinek argues that we go from the clearest thing (what we do) to the fuzziest thing (why we do it). In contrast, inspired leaders and organizations—regardless of their size or their industry—all think, act, and communicate from the inside out.
As physical security risk managers, we tend to be very clear as to what we do on a daily basis—we safeguard people, property, processes, and information. Most of us know how we do it—we implement pragmatic, risk-driven, high-value controls to mitigate near miss and loss events. But when was the last time you asked yourself why you do it?
It’s a simple question, isn’t it? So simple, perhaps, that you’ve never taken the time to ask it. If you’re struggling to answer this, it should then come as no surprise that your peers and senior leaders may have the same questions of you, your department, and its position within your organization.
Several years ago while meeting with a regional business leader I was challenged when he asked, “Once we have our security standards and governance program developed, why do we need you or your department?” I was both stunned and a little humiliated. If his objective was to provoke emotion and to revel my discomfort, he almost succeeded. But in a rare display of wisdom and candor, I replied, “One could ask the same about your legal, HR, or finance departments. There are plenty of options for outsourcing those responsibilities, yet you don’t. Why? Because nothing beats a trusted in-house advisor with skin in the game who is invested in and understands the organization, the strategy, the product, and the people.” He seemed satisfied with the answer, and I managed to avoid walking into a minefield.
This should not have been an issue for him to raise nor a challenge for me to answer. If he was genuine in his curiosity—and it wasn’t just a cheap thrill to see how I tap-danced—there was a gap I needed to address. I needed to make it abundantly clear why our department needed to exist.
“The corporate security graveyard is littered with the corpses of failed security programs in which roles weren’t defined, terminology wasn’t established, and methods for measuring success weren’t disclosed,” says Ray O’Hara, CPP, former president of ASIS International. “If we don’t define this early, clearly, and often, we’ll be misunderstood at best and dismissed at worst. Alignment with your internal customers is critical for success.”
The most foundational governance products every department should first establish are program standards. This is the “why” document. At a high level, it establishes credibility and trust and answers the questions: “Why do we need a security department within our organization,” “What are our responsibilities,” and “How do we intend to achieve success?” It’s an impactful document that establishes your jurisdiction and tells the organization what they can expect from you.
What might a department standard look like? This is by no means a comprehensive listing, but your why might be codified within the following elements:
It’s critical to take a collaborative approach when creating program standards, so enlisting the support from colleagues in departments like legal, HR, cybersecurity, risk management, and safety will aid in buy-in and deconfliction, and you might be able to even borrow similar style, terminology, and processes from them. After all, few of us can claim our standards, procedures and governance products are truly proprietary. They are usually blends of other products from various organizations which can apply best for our industry, organization, location, and culture. Consult codified standards from organizations like ISO, ANSI, NIST, and ASIS. Benchmark drafts with peer organizations.
Further, you will likely be sharing risk with various departments, so it’s critical to understand existing jurisdictions. Finally, to have any status, this document should be reviewed and approved by senior leadership. There will be challenges to your authority and you will need support to defend against this.
This sounds like a lot to consider, but remember, this is not a prescriptive “how-to” manual. Those are your security procedures, a separate governance product. This is a high-level manifesto of sorts which is intended to tell the world of your organization’s purpose—your why—and it should be written such that non-security colleagues and the lowest common elements within your organization can understand it. I’ve found department standards can be adequately communicated in 100 pages or less.
Once you have established why you need a security department within your organization, the next logical question is “How should your associates carry out their responsibilities?” This tactical and operational product will likely be the most consulted governance document within your arsenal, and the establishment and contents of this are the subject of the next article in this series.
But first, start with why.
The comments and views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and may not reflect those of his employer.
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