What we talked about
Michael Green explains why he co-founded Athena Security and how a real, heartbreaking incident in 2023 reinforced the urgency of their mission: saving lives by detecting and denying weapons:and sometimes dangerous people:before they enter facilities. He shares how targeted violence can slip through gaps in coverage and how that reality pushed his team to deploy faster and more widely.
Show notes
When a nurse was killed by an ex-boyfriend with a restraining order at a facility in 2023, Michael Green’s team at Athena Security realized their system could have caught that person twice over, once through ID inspection and once through facial recognition, if only it had been deployed there. That incident transformed a product roadmap into a personal mission.
What we covered
- Athena’s visitor management system performs multi-point ID matching using name, date of birth, and optional facial recognition to detect people on trespass lists or protective order lists before they ever enter a building, two independent chances to stop a known threat.
- The technology uses multi-frequency electromagnetic detection to distinguish between different metals, alloys, shapes, and sizes, allowing facilities to define their own threat targets, from handguns and large knives down to small blades and OC spray, and tune the system accordingly.
- False positives and alarm fatigue are the primary ways security technology fails in practice, not technical limitations. The more contraband categories a facility tries to screen for, the more secondary searches officers must perform, and human consistency degrades with repetition.
- Athena uses AI to enforce officer accountability, tracking whether security staff are physically at the machine, logging why each alarm was triggered, and building an audit trail that shows every person was cleared through a functioning, calibrated detector.
- Social engineering through familiarity is a real vulnerability: a repeat visitor who becomes friendly with guards can slip through without inspection, as illustrated by the story of a smuggler who walked through a military checkpoint daily until the personnel rotated. Technology enforces consistent checks regardless of familiarity.
- Green described the future as “tunnels of truth”, integrated lanes where weapon screening, X-ray, visitor management, access control, and video systems converge into a single operational view, with digital identity verified on arrival so the physical screening becomes seamless and nearly invisible to the person walking through.
About Michael Green
Michael Green is the CEO and co-founder of Athena Security, a company focused on keeping weapons out of buildings through AI-assisted object and behavior recognition. Athena provides a full security operations model that combines hardware, software, training, and ongoing service support for facilities ranging from schools and enterprises to events and venues.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelleonardgreen
- Website: https://Athena-Security.com
Episode 97 of the PreVetted Podcast.