Digital Surveillance, Threat Assessments, Lethal Force: How Security Teams Keep Artists Safe in the Age of Social Media  ...Middle East

In a bland office building in an unremarkable business park in a sleepy part of Los Angeles, a team of information specialists sit at their desks and protect some of the world’s most famous people.

Around them hums a command center of TV and computer screens displaying CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, weather forecasts, real time traffic maps and footage from security cameras trained on private and retail properties. On this normal Wednesday morning, each member of the team — which includes attorneys, PhDs and a woman who speaks five languages — sits at a computer, reviewing documents, scanning social accounts, reading news and ultimately synthesizing this Mission: Impossible episode’s worth of data to determine if there are any threats to the stars they’re contracted to keep safe.

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Stalkers and worse have always haunted pop culture, with countless musicians taking out restraining orders against the lurkers in their orbit, and luminaries like John Lennon, Selena and Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell being murdered by deranged fans. Social media has since made safety infinitely more complicated, as artists are urged to use platforms to connect with fans and build brands, which in turn makes us feel like we know them. This is at once a goal and a risk multiplier, intensifying perceived connections and allowing anyone with Wi-Fi to make a threat.

“Historically, threats were localized and time bound, meaning the threat was in a venue, a hotel; it was a threat against the physical,” says longtime security specialist Dave Komendat. “Threats are now global. It’s anyone, anywhere. It’s real time, and it’s amplified, because one person making a threat can reach a million people, so others may imitate.”

We collectively witnessed this Pandora’s box in March, when soccer player Jorginho publicly accused Chappell Roan of sending her security guard after his 11-year-old daughter in the dining room of an Argentina hotel, posting a statement to his 5 million Instagram followers that said, “To the fans, she does not deserve your affection.” Roan responded by saying the security guard involved in the incident wasn’t hers, and that “I didn’t even see a woman and a child.” While Jorginho later rescinded his accusations, calling the situation “a misunderstanding,” the pop star had already endured a global storm of online hate.  

“I’m quite sure her security stature scaled coming out of Argentina,” says John Spesac, who founded boutique security firm Security Information Specialists (SIS) 27 years ago and notes that “security stature” refers to one’s overall risk profile and security significance as a public figure. (Spesac adds that SIS is not employed by Roan or her team.) “The miscommunication, how it was handled, all of that creates new risk to her brand and her safety. And essentially, it was an event completely created, lived and judged on social media.”

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Traditional threats also persist. In early June, Sabrina Carpenter obtained a restraining order against an alleged stalker who supposedly surveilled her Los Angeles home for a month before attempting to break in, with Carpenter’s declaration citing “significant and ongoing fear for my personal safety and the safety of all individuals residing in my home.” Taylor Swift has had a myriad of stalkers, including one whom police found sleeping in her bed. (Swift was not home when this incident occurred.) In May, a woman fired an AR-15-style assault rifle at Rihanna’s home in Los Angeles, hitting the Airstream trailer the pop icon was in with her partner A$AP Rocky.  

These events are singular and dramatic, but for the modern celebrity, even just moving through the world can be dangerous, or at least unpleasant.  

“People might see you at a hotel or restaurant and post about it, and minutes later, there’ll be people there,” says Kehlani’s longtime manager David Ali. “Somebody might take a picture and fans will know the hotel they’re at, or take a picture of them with coffee in their hands and fans can ID the store. With the internet it’s a completely uncontrolled scenario, because there are so many clues that make the game of finding people easier.”

And when we know what hotel our favorite artist stays at, or where they get their coffee, so too do we feel like we know them, with this knowing fostering a sense of familiarity and, often, expectation.  

“You continually encounter fans who think they actually know the artist and may have never met them,” says Ali, who adds that Kehlani has a multi-member security team. “They’ll be sending emails, talking to them, and you see situations where they even get frustrated that they’re not getting a response.”

“Now, fans don’t admire an artist,” says Spesac. “They feel like they know them, and when you’re dealing with the deranged, that’s a problem because boundaries are confused. Admiration becomes obsession, then rejection if they ignore your DM, and now it’s anger.”

So how are security teams ensuring safety in this dystopia? “It’s being part protector, part psychologist and part brand ambassador while allowing the artist to maintain their brand and proximity to their fans,” says Spesac. “That’s today’s security profession.”

The process begins here, in the anonymous office building. Dubbed The Fusion Center, it’s the digital surveillance hub of Spesac’s SIS. He can’t reveal his client list but says it “absolutely” includes household name celebrities and Fortune 500 execs. SIS also provides security staff for businesses and for the past 21 years has run security for the Academy Awards, an event Spesac calls “one of the most significant private security operations in the world.”

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SIS employs a global 5,000-person team recruited from the military, Secret Service, FBI and various levels of law enforcement. Staff includes not only store security and bodyguards in the Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston cinematic tradition, but behavioral analysts and, says Spesac, “experts capable of verifying capability and de-escalating scenarios.” Here in the Fusion Center, this means that if a threat is determined, staff can send out a mass update notifying clients of a disturbance or directly brief teams on the ground.

“We’re scrubbing social media to understand who’s saying what, when they’re saying it and if they have the ability to carry out a threat,” says Spesac. “That work is constant in our world.” Like other online monitoring services, the team here is capable of taking derogatory information off the internet, so it doesn’t gain momentum or generate threats. Clients also receive risk assessment based on their public personas, so there’s an understanding of how they’re being perceived.  

“We scour the internet and dark web for information,” says SIS’ Joana Kim. “Their phone numbers, email addresses. Who’s mentioned your address? Have people tried protesting you? Has anybody made a petition for you? [With executives especially], you’d be surprised at what’s out there about them, or what they themselves post.” These digital sweeps are also done for the client’s family, who are also often under protection.  

Komendat, who’s the chief security adviser at executive protection firm Corporate Security Advisors and who has worked with Spesac for years, says the goal of digital surveillance is finding “meaningful needles in a relatively large haystack.” A meaningful needle is anyone capable of carrying out a threat. If someone posts that they’re going to kill a particular celebrity, but the team determines that this person lives thousands of miles from where the celeb is, it’s not a meaningful needle. The same goes for people who make threats but have disabilities that make it difficult for them to get around, or who don’t have money to travel.

“Then you have individuals who are mobile,” says Komendat. “So you’re able to look up their local municipality and see they’re a gun owner and that they’ve traveled. You need to pay attention to someone like that.”

Deranged people also come out of nowhere. “Someone like Luigi Mangione is an example of that,” says Komendat, referencing the man who allegedly murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in 2024. “That’s where the physical security presence comes into play.” Spesac emphasizes that threat evaluation, digital protection and physical security must be employed in tandem to create what he calls “the security envelope. It’s an ecosphere you put together around an individual.” He adds that the annual cost of this comprehensive protection “could be less than $20 million. It’s certainly more than a dollar.”

(Spesac also says demand for security surged among corporate execs after Thompson’s killing, with security now often mandated by the board. “It’s a business resiliency exercise,” he says. “Look at what happened to United Healthcare stock after the Thompson murder.”)  

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Musicians are also bringing on security much earlier in their careers. “Before, an artist was being seen by maybe 20 people in a smoky bar,” says Spesac. “Now the foundation is different because of social media and the intimacy it creates.”

Or the type of intimacy it creates. For example, I know that last September, Lady Gaga celebrated her fiancé Michael’s 42nd birthday by kissing him next to a pen of goats, and that there were strawberries on his cake, because she posted photos of these things on her Instagram. If you’re one of her 61 million followers, you probably know these “intimate” details too.  

“If you were a fan of a pop star in the ‘80s, you were exposed to their music and maybe occasionally saw a magazine feature about them or saw them on late night,” says Professor Bradley Bond, who studies parasocial relationships at UC San Diego. “You’d get little blips of information about their personal life.” We are now massively more exposed to famous people, a macro shift that Bond says “strengthens the sense of a parasocial bond, as we feel we have a peek behind the curtain. We have so much more access that our parasocial relationships have become significantly more intense.”

Defined as social and emotional bonds that lack reciprocity — meaning the person you’re bonded to has no idea who you are (for example, you know there were strawberries on the cake for Gaga’s fiancé, and she doesn’t know you exist) — the term “parasocial relationship” was introduced in the 1950s by a pair of social psychologists. They coined it to describe what they felt might be transpiring as TV first entered the home, and suddenly talk show hosts and news anchors were talking directly to the screen. These researchers, says Bond, “were fascinated by the fact that they were giving us a sense of gaze.”

In the ‘90s, other researchers studied how these “close” relationships might motivate people to consume content. If people were engaged by feeling bonded with a celebrity, the celebrity could leverage that to sell people things — music, movies, clothing, entire lifestyles. These possibilities became effectively endless when Facebook, Twitter and Instagram launched in 2004, 2006 and 2010, respectively.

“Before social media, glimpses backstage were rare,” says Bond. “Now they’re common, and part of how celebrities cultivate their fandom.” As “authenticity” is now an industry buzzword for how artists should build fanbases, there’s been a natural reciprocal surge in us feeling like we know them and, as such, consuming what they’re offering.  

Artists thus face tremendous pressure to share themselves online, a practice that can make the marketing of art seem more important than the art itself, and one many artists say they hate. But musicians typically get more interest from labels, agents and fans if they have large social media followings that function as a marketing platform — all while strengthening parasocial relationships.

Bond assures that parasocial relationships are something most people engage in, citing a recent study that found most U.S. teenagers have historically experimented with romance by imagining themselves in relationships with their favorite pop stars. A famous artist who seems like a great mom can fill a gap for someone who doesn’t get along with their own.

“People can be hesitant to share this stuff because they think it suggests some kind of psychosis,” says Bond, “but it’s part of human evolution. Screen technology has evolved faster than our minds, so it’s natural for us to see people and assign personhood.”

To a point. Whether someone loves or hates a musician, parasocial relationships of great intensity have been connected to, Bond says, “potential problematic behavior among people who are otherwise navigating mental health challenges.” When perceived relationships alter one’s daily routine, they’ve become something else. Research shows that such problematic celebrity relationships are often symptoms of other diagnosable challenges. Two of Taylor Swift’s stalkers, for example, were deemed unfit for trial following psychiatric evaluations and ordered into mental health facilities.

While digital tools function to help ensure that bodyguards are never really needed, those digital tools aren’t foolproof — making bodyguards an essential last line of defense. As Spesac puts it, “The point of engagement should be the very last resort.”

The giant bodyguard is a familiar pop culture figure. Prince was famously protected by Charles “Big Chick” Huntsberry, a 6’8”, 400-pound strongman. Big John Harte protected KISS, Iron Maiden and others and The Jonas Brothers have Big Rob. But Spesac says better protection comes from “people that blend seamlessly into any crowd, who are lethal because they have the skills, training, knowledge and background.” While size can still matter, inserting a person who’s quite obviously the bodyguard can create the risk of “security theater” that may draw unwanted attention to the artists and the bodyguards themselves. Spesac warns that untrained or reactive guards can “become part of the social media story because of the way they handled or mishandled fan engagement.” This can be bad for an artist’s brand, especially when everyone has their phones up.  

More so, bodyguards must be strategic and smooth. At a recent show in Texas, an artist showed up to play a nightclub with a muscular but not physically massive bodyguard in tow. This person spoke clearly and respectfully to me and everyone he needed information from, making direct eye contact and quickly determining the backstage guest list, which color wristbands were needed to enter the green room and the route to the stage. It was possible to get a little thrill from helping him do it.  

“People who do this work well are excellent communicators and can work with any celebrity and be just as effective dealing with a hotel valet,” says Komendat. “Respectful security personnel are effective because they build alliances, even if those alliances last for one minute.”

Both Spesac and Bond advise that AI is the next frontier of parasocial relationships and security. Artists may employ AI chatbots to engage with fans, and Bond sees a future where fans create AI avatars in the likeness of their favorite musician. “If Taylor Swift isn’t holding some personality attribute you wish she did, now you can tell AI to act as Taylor Swift, but make her a Republican.” Engaging in fake, custom-made celebrity interactions through AI is, Bond adds, “definitely the future.”  

As professionals work through the new complications presented by emerging technology — and as our culture continues down a path of ever-increasing visibility — Spesac says one fundamental principle remains true: The most effective security is invisible.

“When security works well, the public doesn’t notice,” he says, “and that’s the point.”

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