Building a National Security Index: The Methodology Behind the CIS Lebanon Security Index™
How to build a daily national threat index that survives reality: the scale, the governorate model, the 08:00 discipline, and the failure modes.
Anyone can publish a threat assessment once. The difficulty is publishing one every morning, at the same time, with the same method, for years — including on the mornings when the assessment is inconvenient, when the data is thin, and when yesterday's number was wrong.
The CIS Lebanon Security Index™ is Lebanon's first daily security intelligence system: a 0–100 score across all 9 Lebanese governorates, published every morning at 08:00 Beirut time. I built the methodology, the scale and the publication system.
This is how it works, why each decision was made, and where a system like this breaks. I am writing the method down because a scoring system nobody can audit is a scoring system nobody should trust — including mine.
The scale, and why it has five levels
MEDIUM · 41–60 — Moderate risk — standard security measures apply.
Five levels, mapped onto a 0–100 score:
| Level | Range |
|---|---|
| Minimal | 0–20 |
| Low | 21–40 |
| Moderate | 41–60 |
| High | 61–80 |
| Critical | 81–100 |
Three design decisions are embedded there and each was contested during design.
Why five and not three. Three levels collapse under real conditions. The middle band absorbs everything ambiguous, which is most days, and the scale stops carrying information. Five gives you two distinct "things are deteriorating" states — Moderate and High — and the distance between them is where most useful decisions actually live.
Why five and not ten. Ten levels imply a precision the underlying assessment does not have. If I cannot reliably distinguish a 63 from a 67 — and I cannot — then publishing a scale that asks readers to act on that distinction is dishonest about the method's resolution. The 0–100 score exists to show direction and magnitude of change; the five bands exist to carry the decision.
Why every level has a behavioural instruction. A score with no instruction attached is trivia. Minimal means normal daily activities are recommended. Critical means avoid non-essential travel and activity. If a level cannot be written as a change in behaviour, the level is not doing any work.
Why governorates
The geographic unit is the second design decision and it is more consequential than the scale.
A single national number for Lebanon is close to useless. Conditions in one governorate routinely bear no relation to conditions in another on the same day, and a national average smooths precisely the variation a reader needs. Someone deciding whether to travel, deploy staff, or open a site is asking a local question, and a national number answers a different one.
All 9 governorates, scored separately, every day. That is the smallest unit at which the assessment is both meaningful and sustainable.
Could it go finer — districts, cities, neighbourhoods? Technically yes. It would also be a system that cannot be maintained daily at consistent quality by an operator who also runs a security company, and a system that degrades silently is worse than a coarser one that holds. The right granularity is the finest one you can sustain indefinitely. That is a discipline judgement, not a technical limit, and getting it wrong is how these systems die.
The 08:00 discipline
Publication is at 08:00 Lebanon time. Every day.
The fixed time matters more than the specific hour. Three reasons.
It forces a decision. A system that publishes "when there is something to say" will eventually publish only when something dramatic happens, which turns an index into an alarm. The value of a daily index is precisely the quiet days — they establish the baseline against which a change means something. An index that skips quiet days has no baseline and therefore no signal.
It removes the temptation to wait. Waiting for one more data point feels like rigour and is usually avoidance. A fixed deadline forces the assessment to be made with what is actually known, and to say what is not known.
It makes the record auditable. A daily series with no gaps can be checked against what subsequently happened. A series with gaps cannot, and the gaps will always be the interesting days.
The cost is real: it is a genuine daily obligation, and there is no version of this where it is convenient. That is also why it is a credible signal — the discipline is the product, and it is expensive in the only currency that cannot be faked.
What goes into a score
The inputs are the part most people expect to be secret. They are not secret; they are simply unglamorous.
Incident reporting across the territory, weighted by severity, proximity to population and infrastructure, and — importantly — by how reliably it is reported. Some incident types are consistently under-reported, and a scoring system that treats reporting volume as incident volume will systematically misread the quiet places.
Political and institutional indicators. Government function, security-force posture, scheduled events with a history of escalation.
Economic stress indicators. This is the input most national indices under-weight and Lebanon proves is essential. Currency movement, fuel and power availability, and payment-system function correlate with security conditions on a short lag. I learned this operationally rather than analytically, running a guard force through a collapse in which the lira lost roughly ninety percent of its value and bank deposits froze — an experience I have written about separately.
Regional spillover. Lebanon does not have a domestic-only threat picture, and a model that pretends otherwise is wrong on a predictable schedule.
Operational ground truth. This is the input nobody else in this niche has, and it is the reason a security company publishing intelligence is not the odd combination it appears to be. CIS Security has guards on real sites across all nine governorates, and has since 1990. When the reported picture and the picture from a post diverge, that divergence is itself the most valuable signal in the model.
The four failure modes
Every scoring system I have examined fails in at least one of these ways. Naming them is the only defence.
Ratchet bias. Scores go up easily and come down reluctantly, because raising a score after an incident feels prudent and lowering it feels like a claim. Over months the index drifts upward and permanently reads "High," which means it reads nothing. The countermeasure is an explicit rule for de-escalation, applied on the same evidentiary basis as escalation — and the discipline to apply it on a day when nothing has visibly improved except time.
Recency dominance. One dramatic event overwhelms the model for longer than its actual effect on conditions warrants. The countermeasure is a defined decay, decided in advance rather than in the moment.
Reporting-volume confusion. More reports is not more incidents; it is frequently more attention. A model that cannot separate the two will score a well-covered governorate as more dangerous than a poorly-covered one with worse conditions. This is the failure mode that most quietly destroys credibility, because it is invisible from outside.
Audience capture. The most dangerous one. A published index has readers, and readers have preferences — clients would rather not read that their district is High, and an operator who depends on those clients feels it. The countermeasure is not a technique. It is a standing decision: intelligence-driven, never filtered for comfort. If a score cannot survive being unwelcome, the index is decoration.
Why a security company publishes intelligence
The obvious objection is that a firm selling protection has an interest in threat looking severe.
I take that objection seriously, and the honest answer has three parts.
The record is checkable. A daily, dated, public series across nine governorates over years is the least convenient possible format for inflation. Every score can be compared against what happened next. A firm inflating its index would produce a visible, permanent, self-incriminating record.
The incentive runs the other way more often than people expect. Clients make operational decisions on these numbers. A score that is wrong in the alarming direction costs a client money and costs me credibility — and credibility is the only durable asset in this business. Being wrong towards alarm is not a commercial win; it is a slower version of the same loss.
Publishing forces rigour that private assessment does not. A number that will be read by thousands of people tomorrow morning, and that will still be on the record in a year, gets built more carefully than one that goes into a report and a drawer.
There is also a simpler reason. The operating platform that runs the guard force, the sites and the incident record already exists, and it is where the ground truth lives. An index built on top of a real operation costs less to sustain than one built on a subscription to somebody else's feed, and it is better.
Distribution is part of the method
An index that is published where nobody reads it is a research project. The distribution design is therefore part of the methodology rather than a marketing afterthought.
Publication is at 08:00 Beirut time. Email follows at 08:15, social at 08:30.
The staggering is deliberate and it encodes a priority. The canonical version is the published one, on the site, and it exists first — so that everything downstream references a fixed artefact rather than a recollection of one. Email reaches the people who have asked for it directly. Social reaches the widest audience last, because social is the channel most likely to strip context, and the assessment should already exist in full somewhere before a compressed version of it is in circulation.
That ordering also protects corrections. If the canonical version is the site, a correction has exactly one place to be made and one place to be checked. If the canonical version is whichever channel a reader happened to see, corrections are unenforceable.
The distribution choice reflects a broader position I hold about publishing to an owned audience rather than a rented one: a channel that can rank, bury or throttle you is a channel that owns the relationship. An index whose delivery depends on somebody else's algorithm is an index with a dependency that will eventually be exercised. That is the same reasoning behind RAGE Intel delivering to subscribers directly, and behind the 322,000-follower audience being built organically rather than bought.
If you are building one
Six rules, in the order they matter.
Decide the sustainable cadence before the method. The cadence you can hold indefinitely determines the granularity, the input set and the model complexity. Choose the method to fit the cadence, never the reverse. Every abandoned index I have seen was abandoned because it was designed for an unsustainable rhythm.
Write down the de-escalation rule first. Escalation rules write themselves under pressure. De-escalation rules never do, and their absence is what produces the ratchet.
Separate reporting volume from incident volume explicitly. Not implicitly, not "we account for that" — as a named step in the method.
Attach a behaviour to every level. If a level cannot be expressed as something a reader should do differently, delete it.
Publish the method. An unauditable score is an assertion. This article exists partly to hold my own system to that.
Decide in advance what you will do when the score is commercially inconvenient. You will face it. Deciding in the moment is deciding wrong.
What it is, and what it is not
The Index is an assessment of conditions. It is not a prediction, not a guarantee, and explicitly not targeting, build guidance or operational instruction — a boundary I hold across all published work.
It is one operator's disciplined, dated, daily, checkable view of nine governorates, produced with the same method on the good mornings and the bad ones. That is a modest claim. It is also, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in Lebanon, and the reason is not that the method is difficult. It is that the discipline is.
What I bring that a data vendor cannot: guards on real sites in all nine governorates since 1990, which means when the reported picture and the ground picture disagree, I can tell.
Carlos Kfoury created the CIS Lebanon Security Index™ and is GM/CEO of CIS Security. The daily Index is published by CIS Security at 08:00 Beirut time.
Related: Five Levels of Threat: Inside the Index · Leading Through Collapse · Zero to 322,000, Organically
Carlos Kfoury is a Lebanese security entrepreneur, military strategist, and defense intelligence analyst — GM/CEO of CIS Security (operating since 1990), founder of the RAGE X intelligence ecosystem, and owner and manager of C.I.S. Services s.a.r.l. Full profile · Engage Carlos