Recent posts
Trainers' Manual
Posted: 01.02.2017
NEW RELEASE: The Holistic Security Trainers' Manual is out now!
Tactical Tech is excited to announce the release of the Holistic Security Trainers' Manual.
The Trainers' Manual is a companion to the Strategy Manual for HRDs, drawing out key learnings from the holistic security project from a facilitator's perspective and bringing together best practices from the fields of digital security, physical security and psycho-social well-being. It provides security trainers and facilitators with:
- key best practices for approaching security trainings from a holistic perspective
- stand-alone workshop session plans which can be used independently or to bring a holistic...
Holistic Security in Conversation
by Hannah Smith
Posted: 28.09.2016
Tactical Tech's Hannah Smith sits down with project lead Daniel Ó Cluanaigh to discuss the origins of the project, what we learnt while developing the manual, and what 'holistic security' means for trainers in practice.
The text below has been edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Smith [HS] Dan, the Holistic Security Manual very much owes its existence to your hard work and perseverance – supported I know by a great many trainers and defenders who've contributed to the project along its development. To start us off maybe you can tell me a...
Holistic Security & How We Got Here
by Hannah Smith
Posted: 11.08.2016
Tactical Tech has been training human rights defenders in digital security since 2006 and published Security in-a-Box together with our colleagues at Front Line Defenders in 2008. So how did we get here? Why is the Holistic Security Manual is not another toolkit? And what's its connection to Security in a Box?
Working in the field of digital security is both somewhat simple and massively complex in equal measure. On the simple side, digital security lends itself to technical 'solutions'. No one tool will fix everything, and threat models vary greatly depending on contextual factors. But if used correctly, a small selection of tools and tactics can offer significant...
Visualising Holistic
by Hannah Smith
Posted: 20.07.2016
Tactical Tech has a long history of using and advocating for design in activism. For the Holistic Security Manual, the challenge came in working out how to best present 94 pages of dense text in an appealing and accessible manner, without losing valuable content in favour of brevity. To achieve this, we were keen to create a strong visual identity which would help communicate some of the complex and abstract ideas present.
From the outset, we wanted to avoid the traditional, militaristic, and gendered visual tropes which often come hand in hand with topics of security, as well as the polar, yet equally stereotypical imagery which can be found in all things “holistic”. Try a search if you're interested... these some examples from the first page of Google...