From Homeland411
Author and security expert Ami Toben sets an intriguing stage in his book Surveillance Zone: The Hidden World of Corporate Surveillance Detection & Covert Special Operations. Although its opening is reminiscent of a James Bond movie, placing the reader right in the middle of a past security assignment, Surveillance Zone is much more than that. It’s a comprehensive primer for those interested in security issues and the profession surrounding it. The book is also a personal narrative that takes the reader from Israel to the United States and Japan, with stops in Canada along the way.
The impetus for the book was Toben’s blog Protection Circle. Launched in 2013, the site’s popularity exploded, and Toben said he was often asked when the book was coming out. “Once the blog reached something like 160,000 readers, I started kind of thinking, you know what, I think I might be able to pull this off, so I gave it a shot,” he said. The book was released in 2017.
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Today, Toben is the director of consulting, training, and special operations for HighCom Security Services Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area firm that offers a full spectrum of protection services—from event and site security to individual protective services. Toben recently checked in with Homeland411 to talk about security specifics and reflect on his own experiences that have taken him around the globe.
Background, Training, IDF, and Martial Arts
Toben was born and raised in Israel, just about three miles from Lebanon. In the 1990s he was a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Though an Israeli native, his father was an immigrant from the United States and his mother from Montreal, so he retains both Canadian and American citizenship as well.
A martial arts aficionado from his late teens, he studiously followed that passion all the way to Japan after his IDF experience and ended up with two first-degree blackbelts after just two years. The details of his experience in Japan—as well as his rather unorthodox efforts to obtain a Japanese visa—are worth the read in Surveillance Zone.
Read the full article at Homeland411
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