Today's briefing:
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the terrorist threat has fragmented worldwide.
Watchdog faults the Secret Service over years of ignored drone warnings.
FBI probes a breach exposing 153 million driver's-license scans.
Welcome to your weekly briefing.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, its influence still runs through the way we think about security. It shaped careers, changed expectations, and gave a generation of practitioners a reference point for what failure could look like.
This week, we're asking whether the threat we've learned to plan for is still the one we're most likely to face. The anniversary offers a reason to look back, but also to examine how much of our thinking has kept pace with what came next.
Don’t have time to read? Watch 👇
TOP STORY
The World That 9/11 Built
September 11, 2001, changed what governments, businesses, and the public expected security to prevent. The attacks killed 2,977 people and made the possibility of mass-casualty terrorism a permanent consideration in ordinary life, from boarding a flight to planning a public event.
Twenty-five years later, those responsibilities remain. The threat has become more varied than the centrally directed attack that gave the response its urgency.
Brown University puts the broader American response through fiscal 2022, including future veterans' care, at about eight trillion dollars. Yet armed groups have established themselves where governments struggle to provide basic security. In 2007, the Sahel, the dry belt below the Sahara, accounted for less than 1% of global terrorism deaths. By 2024, it accounted for more than half.
There, JNIM, al-Qaeda's regional affiliate, and Islamic State Sahel Province control territory and compete for influence. Armed groups extract revenue from communities and trade. JNIM has blockaded fuel supplies and attacked transport routes to weaken Mali's government. A road under its control can finance operations and make life in the capital harder without its fighters having to capture the city.
The partnerships intended to contain them have fractured. Military coups preceded France's withdrawal from Mali and the subsequent American departure from Niger. Russia supplied support through Wagner and later Africa Corps. Wagner's early operations in Mali included atrocities that helped jihadist recruitment. Keeping a government in office has proved a different undertaking from making its country safer.
The consequences travel. Violence is pressing toward coastal West Africa, threatening the roads and supply relationships businesses depend on. For security teams, understanding a destination increasingly means understanding what can interrupt the journey, the fuel delivery, or the assistance promised in an emergency.
Elsewhere, the challenge can be an individual with no direct connection to a terrorist organization. Someone can absorb extremist propaganda online and attack a public place without joining a group or receiving orders. Organized plots remain dangerous, but disrupting their networks cannot reach every person preparing violence independently. Combating Terrorism Center
That is the difficult inheritance of September 11. We built institutions, careers, and everyday routines around preventing another attack, while the people planning violence continued to adapt. Security now carries a permanent public expectation of prevention, even when an attacker's preparations offer very little to detect. Twenty-five years of experience have made us better equipped to confront that responsibility, and more aware of how much it asks.
Sound even smarter:
The Costs of War project at Brown University's Watson Institute counts more than 940,000 people killed directly in the post-9/11 wars across Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan through 2023, and about 38 million displaced.
ACLED, the conflict-monitoring group, recorded that clashes between jihadist groups and state forces in the Sahel rose 42 percent between 2024 and 2025, as the militants shifted toward confronting governments directly rather than staging one-off attacks.
READER POLL
What most influences the threats your organization prepares for?
*Skip to the end to see the results of last week’s poll ↓
THE SPECIALIST SERIES - VOL 1
TACTICAL MEDICINE
The Protectors Guide to Saving Lives Under pressure
The Tactical Medicine is your field guide when something goes wrong on a detail. It covers what to carry, what to do in the first few minutes when a casualty cannot wait, and how to keep someone alive until the professionals take over.
MEANWHILE
The Warnings the Secret Service Skipped
A Government Accountability Office review released this week through Senator Chuck Grassley's office found the Secret Service handled 83 security incidents between 2015 and 2025 but changed its protection policies after only 25 of them, and often failed to record why it left a policy alone. Drone policy was one of the gaps. It stayed put through a drone that touched President Obama's motorcade in 2015 and one flown over a Bernie Sanders rally, until a drone flown for about eleven minutes helped enable the July 2024 attempt on Donald Trump at Butler.
The review also found the agency missed a four-year deadline to refresh 8 of its 22 protection policies, and that a memo splitting overseas-protection duties with the Diplomatic Security Service has not been updated since 1991. Homeland Security accepted all three recommendations, including one to document its reasoning whenever an incident does not trigger a change. The full report detail is in our Circuit Wire report.
The Guard on a Targeted House
A 51-year-old private security guard was shot dead early on September 1 when about 30 masked men opened fire in Overasselt, a village in the eastern Netherlands. Officers had gone to the house at around 4am to check reports of suspicious activity, and the group fired the moment the first unit arrived. Two officers were wounded. The guard had been hired to protect the property the attackers targeted.
Dutch police arrested 34 people from four countries in a nationwide manhunt and seized weapons, data storage and several vehicles. The same house was shot at a dozen times in a single attack last year. Investigators have linked the violence to the network of a fugitive drug boss, and the national police chief called it unprecedented.
SNAPSHOTS
🇨🇴 Colombia. The US embassy warned on September 3 of an elevated risk of ELN explosive-drone attacks in Cesar department. Recent strikes wounded five officers in July and killed one in August. US personnel are restricted from parts of the department.
🇭🇹 Haiti. The UN Gang Suppression Force's mandate expires on September 30 unless the Security Council renews it. Gangs hold much of Port-au-Prince, an estimated 1,408 people were killed between April and June, and about 1.5 million are displaced.
🇮🇷 Gulf. US forces struck Iranian minelaying launchers on Larak Island, and Iran answered with missiles at bases in Jordan, eight intercepted, and a drone at the UAE. A supertanker caught fire after striking two mines in the strait.
🇮🇩 Indonesia. The Anak Krakatau volcano erupted on September 5, and ash closed Jakarta's main airports into September 6. More than 170,000 travelers were stranded across eight airports as hundreds of flights were cancelled.
EXTRA INSIGHT
REGULATION. Police in Great Britain made 3,061 terrorism-related arrests in the year to March 2026, up more than elevenfold on the year before. Almost all of the rise, 92 percent, came from the July 2025 ban on the protest group Palestine Action; strip those out and arrests barely moved. The ban also changed who is detained, with an average age of 59 and nearly half women, and a record 273 people held on terrorism offences.
CYBER. A dark-web service advertised more than 153 million driver's-license scans for sale, traced to IDScan, a Louisiana firm whose ID-checking machines run in car-rental desks, banks, retailers and bars across the US. Each scan holds a name, address, date of birth, license number and photo, and a cabinet member's license was reportedly among them. The FBI has opened an investigation into one of the largest identity exposures on record.
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NEW RESOURCE FOR PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS
The Medical Gap
A medical certificate can be current while the skill behind it has already faded. In The Medical Gap, we look at what a protection detail can realistically do during the minutes before EMS arrives, including the evidence behind early bleeding control, how quickly practical skills deteriorate, and why the legal position of a paid protector differs from that of an ordinary bystander.
You'll learn how to test whether your team's medical capability holds up beyond the paperwork, match equipment to the people trained to use it, and set a refresher schedule based on skill retention rather than certificate expiry. Premium readers also receive the Medical Capability and Kit Audit, a practical workbook for scoring the detail, identifying its weakest areas, specifying kit by operational tier, and tracking when each operator needs to be tested again.
Before you go, help us build the benchmark. We are running an anonymous salary survey, open to every reader, to test how pay across this profession really holds up against the numbers. It takes a few minutes, your answers stay anonymous, and the full results will be published later this year.
We opened by asking whether the threat you plan for is still the one you're most likely to face. There's a reason 9/11 still shapes how we answer that question. An event like that stays with a profession. But as we remember it this week, it's worth asking what we would change if we wrote those plans today, using what we now know.
See you next week,
– On The Circuit
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PREVIOUS POLL - RESULTS
Q: A client's business gets linked to a foreign conflict. What do you check first?
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Signs of surveillance around the premises (63%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Who has access to the site and loading bays (31%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The vetting on recently hired staff (7%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Something else (0%)
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