Overview
The Holistic Security Manual, jointly authored by Tactical Tech and Front Line Defenders, is the standard practitioner reference for integrating digital security, psychosocial wellbeing, and organisational security into a single defender-preparedness framework. It supplies a strategy manual, a trainers’ manual, and a set of workshop exercises, all free and CC-licensed.
How it works
https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/resource-publication/holistic-security
Holistic Security treats digital security as one of three interlocking dimensions human-rights defenders must cultivate, alongside psychosocial wellbeing (the capacity to sustain the work) and organisational security (the policies and culture that keep the group safe). [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech] The strategy manual walks defenders through a structured process of assessing context, mapping threats, identifying well-being pressures, and writing an integrated security plan that names actions across all three dimensions. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech] The approach is explicitly critical of tool-first training — defenders who adopt Signal without first understanding who might compel a device unlock, or who adopt encrypted email without first agreeing on what may be written down at all, create new vulnerabilities in the act of fixing old ones. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech]
The trainers’ manual supplies workshop exercises for each section, making the framework usable as a multi-day facilitator curriculum rather than only as a self-study reading. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech] Exercises are designed for groups of ten to twenty defenders and cover context-mapping, threat-modelling, well-being reflection, and the writing of action plans. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech] Material is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0, which permits reuse with attribution and the same license; the wiki paraphrases and links rather than reproducing extended passages. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech]
The manual has been adopted and translated by regional human-rights networks across Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia; the publication page on the Front Line Defenders site hosts translated PDFs alongside the English originals. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech] Because it is the one practitioner reference that treats psychosocial and organisational security as first-class rather than as afterthoughts to the digital-security checklist, it fills a gap that purely technical guides leave open. [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech]
When to use it
Running a multi-day defender security training; designing an integrated security plan that addresses digital, psychosocial, and organisational risks together; grounding a campaign’s security culture in a defender-led framework rather than a vendor-led one.
Related methods
- affinity-groups
- civic-tech
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
- public-narrative
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Tactical Technology Collective — CC BY-SA 4.0