ExpiredForensic Linguistic Intelligence in Corporate Security

Date: April 22, 2022
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
Location: Virtual Meeting
Guest Speaker: Robert A. Leonard, Ph.D

Please join the ASIS NYC Chapter and the ASIS CSO Center for an educational webinar hosting guest speaker Robert A. Leonard, Ph.D. Dr Leonard will speak on Forensic Linguistic Intelligence as a tool in corporate investigations, counter-terrorism, and forensic linguistically enhanced threat assessment.

Forensic linguistics is the application of scientific language analysis to issues of the law.

The language used in anonymous death threats, information leaks, and ransom notes can be analyzed through dialectology, sociolinguistics, and linguistic variation to indicate a writer’s regional and local geographic origin, education level, native language, past travel, occupational training, etc., and vastly narrow the suspect pool, all the while guarding against disinformation like masquerading or masking. Once potential subjects are identified, authorship analysis can indicate (or exclude) possible authors.

Using Leonard’s own cases in corporate security, law enforcement, counter-terrorism, and counterintelligence, this presentation demonstrates how, through advanced techniques of analyzing language evidence, to help Manage, Investigate, Interdict and Prosecute:

• Threats of violence in organizations
• Corporate espionage detection and interdiction
• Assessment and interdiction of internal and external threats
• Identification of extortionists and threateners
• Internal and external illegal information leaks
• False information spread

Register in advance for this meeting held on Zoom:

https://asisonline.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpdO2pqj8vGNQzqb56rQXmYdPvc-TYHtcF

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Speaker Bio:

Robert A. Leonard, Ph.D. has worked as a consultant in the use of forensic linguistics in threat assessment, counter-terrorism, and law enforcement for the FBI, JTTF, UK’s MI-5, SIS, and GCHQ, and other police, counter-terrorism, and intelligence agencies throughout North America and Europe, including work on the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit’s Communicated Threat Assessment Database. Other clients have included Apple, Chevron, Facebook, and the Prime Minister of Canada.

Leonard’s testimony was pivotal in investigating and prosecuting many serious crime cases, including international corporate investigations, the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, death threats to judges and members of the US Congress, the triple homicide of the Coleman family in Illinois and the Facebook murders in Tennessee.

The New Yorker magazine calls Leonard “one of the foremost language detectives in the country. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/words-on-trial.  Also see “A Tight Leash” and “Words Matter” on Forensic Files, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acHg0L5ky30 a 4:24 video clip discussing forensic linguistics for Investigation Discovery.)

Leonard wrote the “Forensic Linguistics” chapter in Van Hasselt and Bourke’s recent Handbook of Behavioral Criminology: Contemporary Strategies and Issues. He has been a plenary speaker at ATAP International’s Annual Threat Management Conference in Anaheim, at CATAP, at the Ohio State Atty General’s Conference on Law Enforcement, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit’s Forensic Linguistics bootcamps at Quantico and keynoted at the Ohio Certified Fraud Examiners’ Emerging Trends in Fraud Investigation & Prevention Conference.

A Fulbright Fellow for his doctoral research, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia Graduate School, where he was a Faculty Fellow.

But in his 20’s, Leonard had a different career. TIME magazine wrote

“He opened for Jimi Hendrix [at Woodstock] …but music stardom held little appeal for Leonard, who traded limousines and gold-lame suits to pursue studies in linguistics. Piling up a slew of advanced degrees (an M.A., an M.Phil., and a Ph.D.) from Columbia (including six years of field research among tribes in East Africa), Leonard is now a professor and the director of Hofstra University’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment and Strategic Analysis.”

Leonard once joked to Slate: “I guess I’m one of the very few people in the world who has worked with both the FBI and the Grateful Dead.”