"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

This truism is particularly applicable to counter-terrorism, where agencies working to protect the public are constantly adapting to create new tools that can address dynamic, emerging threats. Without new tools, our reliance on outdated methodologies can cause us to miss potential threats or significantly underestimate their severity.

Arguably, the oldest tool in the profession is that of talking to people. The ability to ask useful questions and interpret the answers is the foundational skillset for human intelligence (HUMINT), and its importance has not changed in thousands of years.

What has changed is how we apply that skillset. At the Human Intelligence Group, we are committed to the highest level of expertise with the best available tools, whether that comes through through open-source intelligence collection via social media, sophisticated link analysis using relational databases, on-line and collaborative document exploitation, or cutting-edge threat assessment based on structured professional judgment alongside the application of peer-reviewed analysis instruments.

As an agency committed to training, we are constantly seeking out new avenues of study and research for our staff, which is why we maintain active national and international board certifications, and why we strive to exceed the continuing education requirements for those credentials.

Identifying and understanding human element of violence will always be central to counter-terrorism, and we are committed to preserving the best traditional approaches while also integrating them with the tools and techniques of the twenty-first century.