Publishing the standard that judges my own industry

Technical surveillance countermeasures is an almost perfectly unobservable service. Someone arrives at your building, spends a few hours with equipment you have no way to evaluate, and gives you a document saying they found nothing. You cannot tell whether that was rigorous work or a walk-through, because the deliverable of a good sweep and the deliverable of a bad one look identical. Both are a report saying nothing was found.

Economists have a name for this situation, and the conclusion is not encouraging. When buyers cannot distinguish quality before purchase, and cannot reliably distinguish it after purchase either, quality stops being what competition runs on. Price becomes the visible axis, and the market drifts toward whoever can produce a plausible-looking report most cheaply.

That is roughly where this industry sits. It contains genuinely serious practitioners and it contains people who bought a detector last year, and from the outside they present almost identically: the same confident language, the same photographs of equipment, the same assurances about discretion and experience.

The two signals buyers actually use

In the absence of a way to assess method, buyers fall back on two things. The first is price, which in this field is nearly uncorrelated with quality in either direction — an expensive provider may simply have a better sales operation, and a cheap one may be running a loss-leader that ends in an upsell. The second is confidence: how certain the person sounded, how serious the threat was made to feel.

The second signal is worse than useless, because it is the one thing a bad provider can produce at zero cost. Conviction is free. It is also the reason so much of the marketing in this sector leads with how likely you are to be under surveillance rather than with what the provider will actually do, and the reason a certain kind of firm will find something dramatic on the first visit.

What a standard does

The way out of an information asymmetry is not for the seller to insist more loudly that they are one of the good ones. Everyone says that, and saying it carries no information. The way out is to give the buyer a cheap test they can apply themselves.

So I wrote down the twenty questions I would ask if I were buying this service instead of selling it, along with what a competent answer sounds like and what should end the meeting. Some of them are commercial hygiene that takes ten minutes to check on a public register. Some are technical: my favourite is asking how a provider handles a device that is not transmitting, because it is the question that most cleanly separates people who understand detection from people who own a detector.

The obvious objection

This document makes my own sales conversations harder. It hands prospective clients a list of demands, it invites them to check my registrations rather than take my word, and it will be used by competitors to prepare for meetings with me.

All of that is fine, and some of it is the point. A standard that quietly favoured its author would be worthless, and — more to the point — would be transparently worthless to exactly the sort of careful reader I want to work with. So the test I set myself was that every good answer in the document had to be one that any competent independent provider could give. None of it is written so that only my company passes.

If you use it to hire someone other than me, it has done its job.

There is a self-interested argument underneath the principled one, and I would rather state it than pretend it does not exist. I am better off in a market where buyers ask hard questions. I lose the clients who were only ever going to choose on price, and I win the ones who wanted to buy carefully and previously had no way to. That is a trade I will take.