Is he Cheating on you? 829 Telltale Signs
An important part of competitive intelligence and economic espionage comes from indicators of activity. An indicator is something which gives a clue as to activity, though not directly related.
The concept of indicators as being something a company needs to manage to protect itself seems, for some reason, hard for many to grasp. While we often give examples, many still have a hard time believing that someone in a company has to be charged with looking for indicators and hiding them. So we thought we’d try another approach to show their importance.
One area in which indicators have been highly thought through is infidelity: There is extensive documentation of what indicators to look-for. A book we highly recommend to readers interested in OPSEC is Ruth Houston’s Is he Cheating on you? 829 Telltale Signs (ISBN 0-9720553-4-7), which you can buy for $29 at http://www.infidelityadvice.com/.
We recommend this book because it contains hundreds –829 of them, as the title indicates – indicators. Some of these are pretty obvious: You come home and catch him in bed with someone, or, worse yet, you contract a venereal disease. Others are more subtle, yet, if there are many of them, may indicate an affair.
The book has an astonishing 21 chapters of indicators:
• Physical appearance
• How he relates to you
• Conversational clues
• Work habits
• Day-to-day behavior
• Financial affairs
• Travel
• Personality or behavioral changes
• Absences
• Telephone tip-offs
• Car clues
• Sex
• Eating habits
• Smells and tastes
• Invasion of your home
• Gifts
• Computer use
• Cell phones and pagers/beepers
• Physical evidence
• His behavior around other women
• Accidental slip-ups or disclosures
Why do you want to read this, particularly if you are neither having nor looking to discover an affair? Because your competitors and adversaries have a list of indicators they are using to find out what you are doing. And your CI group has a similar list to find out what they are doing! If you know what indicators your opponents seek to discover, you can hide them.
We consider Is he Cheating on you? 829 Telltale Signs a must-own book for anyone involved in protecting information: It will be a constant reminder of the revelatory nature of indicators, and why you need to deal with them.
