SEC-03-01
Team Structure and Method
How a professional surveillance team organizes, and why it has to
SEC-02 taught you what your group reveals. This lesson teaches you how the people who might be collecting on that exposure actually organize and move — roles, formations, and technique. You cannot recognize surveillance you don’t understand. SEC-03 is an awareness course: it teaches you to recognize what you’re looking at. SEC-07 (Watching the Watchers: Operations) is where you’ll actually learn to build a surveillance detection route and run a countersurveillance team.
Why This Course Exists
SEC-02 was built for every member of your group. It taught the defensive baseline: what critical information is, how indicators are created, how to recognize that you might be watched, and what to do about it in the moment. That course ends at recognition — noticing a pattern and making a decision not to reveal that you’ve noticed.
SEC-03 goes one level deeper without yet asking you to act operationally. It’s for any member who wants to understand how surveillance actually works — how a team organizes, what fixed versus mobile versus technical collection looks like, and why every surveillance effort, however well run, has real vulnerabilities. If your group later designates you for an active detection or countersurveillance role, SEC-07 builds directly on what you learn here.
Notice versus counter
Camp X SOE tradecraft draws a distinction that runs through this entire course: the operator who merely notices a follower has done nothing yet. The operator who can check for surveillance, confirm it, and either shake it or use it has done the job. SEC-03 teaches the first half — understanding what you’d be noticing. SEC-07 teaches the second half.
How a Professional Surveillance Team Organizes
The Foundation for Everything Else in This Course
A single person following another person on foot is fragile. One missed light, one turn into a store, one moment of eye contact, and the follow is blown. Anyone who has to sustain surveillance over time — rather than get lucky once — organizes as a team. Understanding that team structure matters because a team leaves more signature than a lone follower, and signature is what SEC-07 will eventually teach you to detect.
| Role | Function |
|---|---|
| Eyeball | The team member with direct visual contact on the subject at any given moment. This role rotates constantly — no single person keeps eyeball for long, because sustained proximity is what gets noticed. |
| Floaters | Team members positioned ahead of, behind, or parallel to the subject, ready to assume eyeball when the current eyeball needs to peel off. |
| Control / Net | Coordinates the team by radio or signal, tracks who has eyeball, and directs repositioning. On a small team, control may also be a floater. |
The Box. A common surveillance formation: team members positioned on multiple sides of the subject — ahead, behind, and to at least one flank — rather than strung out in a single line behind them. A subject who only watches their six will miss a team running the box, because the team member who eventually picks them up may already be ahead, having anticipated the route rather than followed it.
The Leap-Frog. Rather than one person tailing continuously, team members alternate: Team Member A follows for a stretch, then peels off into a store, a side street, or simply stops, while Team Member B — already positioned ahead or nearby — assumes the follow. No single person or vehicle stays in the subject’s field of view long enough to register as familiar. This is the same principle Camp X SOE tradecraft describes for following on foot: vary distance, use physical cover, never stop or start at the same moment as the subject.
This is why the rule of three from SEC-02 matters more than it first appears. A well-run leap-frog is specifically designed to defeat casual, single-observation awareness. It does not defeat pattern recognition across multiple separate sightings, because a competent team’s vulnerability is exactly the same repetition principle that applies to your group: repetition is the most dangerous element for the watcher too. SEC-07 builds an entire operational skill — the surveillance detection route — around forcing that vulnerability to show itself.
Think of a location your group uses regularly — a meeting site, a rally point, a member’s home. If a team were running the box on someone approaching that location, where would the floaters most plausibly position themselves given the terrain? You don’t need to act on this, and this course won’t ask you to detect it operationally — SEC-07 does. For now, just notice how much easier the box is to picture once you know it exists.
Explain why SEC-03 exists as a course separate from SEC-02.
Name the three roles on a surveillance team: eyeball, floaters, control.
Describe the box and leap-frog techniques and why each exists.