Holistic Security Manual (Tactical Tech / Front Line Defenders)
Summary
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.
Body
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]
Use it for
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
- 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