I’ve been thinking about this since the announcement was made. As usual the clear thinking of the teemings have crystallzied my thoughts and made me realize that it isn’t much more than a new set of clothes for the emporer.
Thanks everyone.
Bob
Almost as a side-note, It’s curious to me that the world wide web was originally conceived by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory) to address this very co-ordination issue - one part of CERN or an outside Agency doing work, having done work, having expertise on particular issues, etc – by linking sources and information together between different Agencies, often in different languages. I guess we all kinda know how that concept works now.
So, from a purely informational perspective, the problem of coordination doesn’t seem that great.
The problem, IMHO, remain the turf issue but also the quality of information coming in – electronics are all fine an’ dandy but the US can’t even trace OBL’s money trail after the event. Huge amounts of low-level quality information resulting in sorting the chaff from, well, the chaff.
Human Intelligence has to be the key. Not having a single covert agent on the ground in central Asia for over a decade might be indicative of the kinds of institutional failure worth looking at within the US Intelligence community.
In relation to the OP, I tend to think of this as not so much rearranging deck chairs but as buffing them up for public viewing.
Or, as we used to say about periodic reorganizations where I worked, “Same monkeys, different trees.”
And…I spose Health and Human Services and Environmental Protection are 
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
The proof is in the pudding, if it works who cares what the name is.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by PhiloVance *
**
And…I spose Health and Human Services and Environmental Protection are
[quote]
Yes, it is hard to think of an improved name. Whereas Homeland is corny.
And?
It strikes me that a review of the evidence on such bureacratic added layers to magically achieve greater coordination is that we can assume this will fail. Waste of resources for the chicken littles to feel better.
You can’t get rid of bureaucracy by creating more bureaucracy.
And just wait for the turf wars to start. By the time this is done, this new bureaucracy is going to be anything but the clean sheet of paper it was intended to be. It’s going to be a patchwork mess of compromises and congressional juggling, and in the end is going to wind up bloating the size of government, restricting freedoms even further, and accomplishing nothing.
So this behemoth of an agency is going to incorporate the coast guard, huh? How long before the ‘war on drugs’ winds up in the hands of the ‘Homeland Security’ department? And with all the sweeping powers they’ll have to conduct surveillance and other operations, there goes another chink in the public’s civil liberties.
Does anyone remember the reason why the FBI and the CIA and the NSA were made separate agencies in the first place? The FBI was given jurisdiction over domestic matters, and the CIA was supposed to be purely concerned with external matters. The reason for this was because external security requires investigative powers and intelligence assets that have no place in the arsenal of a domestic agency. It was a check against the CIA and NSA’s powerful bugging and intelligence gathering tools being used against American citizens.
Well, now you’re not only wrapping them together, but including a host of other peripheral agencies like Treasury, the Coast Guard, the INS, and the NHS. What an incredibly bad idea.
Why is it that in a country that prides itself in the strength it gains from a free population, every time there is a crisis the only proposed solution is a huge, centrally planned bureaucracy?
Mark my words on this one - the department of homeland security is going to be a mess. It’s yet another wrong step by the Bush administration to add to the list of wrong steps they’ve been making in the last three months.
What really bugs me, though, is that trying to protect the security of a free country with an agency like this is doomed to failure anyway. The United States is FULL of soft targets. You can’t protect them all. And if you spent billions of dollars hardening 99.9% of those targets, the terrorists will simply adjust their efforts towards the last .1% that you missed. Are you going to protect every truck, every ship, every dam, every factory, every power plant, every power supply, and every shopping mall? Please. If the terrorists release five canisters of Sarin gas in strategic locations in the Mall of America during Christmas, or in Grand Central Station, or a large office complex, they’ll kill thousands. You can’t protect them all. Look at Israel - it has security we would never accept in North America. Every public place has armed guards. And it’s FAR smaller than the U.S. And terrorist attacks still occur.
Why are politicians so afraid of involving the public? The only way to defend a free society is to engage the public in their own defense. Every factory owner, plant foreman, and building manager should have programs available to him to teach him how to protect his assets. People should get tax breaks for implementing defensive measures.
And since you can’t stop all attacks, efforts should be made to limit the damage. Vaccine availability and evacuation plans are necessary. Critical facilities should be decentralized, or backup plans put into place.
Corporations should step up efforts to plan for disaster recovery. ISO 9001 specifies things like disaster recovery plans for critical infrastructure, and it works quite well. The government should encourage more of this among all businesses. Our economy is far more vulnerable than it needs to be.
Now, this may be more controversial, but one area where a ‘citizen militia’ makes sense is in homeland defense. To that end, I would consider a national concealed-carry permit, tied to a national program for training in handguns and a licensing/registration system for people who wish to take part.
Aircraft should have defensive equipment for use by passengers who are helping to restrain violent passengers. light chain mail gloves and vests are an excellent defense against someone with a knife, yet they are totally useless as an offensive weapon. Likewise, handcuffs or zip-tie thumb cuffs should be available. Store a set in every half-dozen overhead lockers. Offer ‘airplane proctor’ certificates for citizens, that gets them trained in submission, first aid, simple identification of typical terrorist behaviours and weapons, etc. Make it tax deductible.
You can make yourself safer, and more free. And you don’t have to spend 40 billion dollars a year and create a monstrous new bureaucracy to do it.
Nor do you make existing bureaucracy more efficient that way.
I agree.
Bingo.
Bingo.
Bingo, and added note, CIA was supposed to be the intel clearing house…
Sam and I rarely agree, but boy do we agree here.
Well, here we have to part: the issue is information and free flow. There does need to be a central clearing house for the intelligence, and it does have to have security. It strikes me increased effic of existing organizations rather than more layers is the only rational approach.
They do seem to be off balance and flailing.
I am a bit puzzled by this.
First, I think that this is precisely the sort of situation where ‘costs’ are externalized as much as possible. Privatized terror defence is likely to end up more patchworky and inefficient than something else. The incentives for free riding given an otherwise highly competitive economic environment are just to plainly evident.
How many facilities and firms go for ISO 9001 cert? It’s expensive.Not a cost that is easily borne and individual replication of a general security program – indeed one targetted and properly linked with skilled intelligence – is not likely to be efficient, nor is it in any way obvious to me how this might be a real response to the threat. Some plant manager looking out for “a-rabs”?
Oh great, lots of folks like ottto and so forth with not a clue with concealed weapons looking for them ayrabs and mooslims to shoot.
This is absurd. Really very absurd bordering on the ludicrous. The obvious note is that there is no way to predict nor control without a proper security system who is going to use those wonderful devices, it may very well be the terrorist(s).
It is all well and fine to abstract away from such problems and just imagine that only the good private citizens will have access, but the world ain’t that easy nor pretty.
It’s not absurd - it’s a simple, effective technique that costs almost nothing, could be implemented overnight, and would improve our safety. And kevlar gloves are the ultimate ‘asymmetric’ tool - they are of tremendous use in defense against a knife, but absolutely useless as an offensive weapon.
An ‘airplane proctor’ certificate wouldn’t just be a self-defense program - that’s of limited use anyway. It would include things like identifying suspicous behaviour, how to alert the flight crew without alerting the terrorists, etc. It would also include training in first aid and emergency egress, which would be useful in every aircraft incident.
I have a hard time seeing a downside to such a program. Make it available, fund it with tax credits for people who take it, or don’t fund it at all - let people pay for it themselves if they want to take it. Lots of people will.
Israel engages the citizenry in ways that we haven’t. Stores hire private security firms that are specially trained in terrorist interdiction, or they defend themselves. A lot of citizens are armed, and a LOT of terrorist attacks have been prevented or limited in scope when a citizen shot the terrorist. You just don’t hear about that a lot in the western news.
As for ISO certification - I’m not suggesting that all companies be ISO certified. Having been involved in that process, I know how expensive it is, and how useless most of it would be for smaller businesses. I was just using the Disaster Recovery Planning aspect of it as an example of the kinds of steps businesses can take to protect themselves.
How about the government offering a tax credit to small businesses for owners to take a certified course in disaster recovery planning? If a small ISP can come up with a DRP that allows them to have their servers back up and running in an alternate location in the event of a disaster, then the country will be that much stronger. These are the kinds of things that should be encouraged.
The citizenry can do a lot. Even simple things like making sure you have a week’s supply of fresh water at home and driving around on the top half of a tank of gas instead of the bottom half can make it much easier to control a disaster. Why isn’t the government even mentioning these things?
I guess my main point is that we are being treated like children. We station soldiers in airports without bullets in their guns, because some paternalistic bureaucrat thinks it will help us sleep better at night. Civilian programs for security aren’t offered, because the government is afraid of telling us what we need to hear. Instead, there will be a huge bureaucracy, massive intrusions into our private lives, and in the end it won’t do much anyway. Bah.
I would just like to add that two major terrorist attacks have been averted so far - and BOTH of them were averted by citizens who saw what was going on and took action. We should help that effort.
Police forces rarely stop crimes - they catch and punish people after the crime is committed. You can’t put police in enough places in the United States that would result in even a extremely tiny percentages of critical installations can be protected. Enlisting the people gives you 300 million pair of eyes and ears to draw from. Huge bang for the buck.
Well, I agree that devising an appropriate response the relentlessly falling cost of mayhem production should involve public discussion as well as input from the broader civil society.
Collounsbury has noted that the existing plan does little to enhance the ability of the government to analyze security data. True. Some commentators recommend (therefore) that intelligence be centralized at the CIA. I’m not quite sure how that would work, however. I am inclined to establish a (new) agency with broad investigatory powers but circumscribed prosecutory powers. But I haven’t thought it through. Disturbingly, I haven’t read of a lot of discussion on this topic.
But there are other aspects to homeland security. Container inspection, for example, needs to be overhauled and it may make sense to unify border controls under 1 agency instead of (I think) 3.
I’ve posted this before, but taking a leaf from the Defense Department in this instance might be a good idea. When they perceive an emerging threat, they appoint a “red team” and “blue team”. The red team plans attack while the blue team works on defense. They then get together and run a simulation. That exercise could usefully be applied to vulnerabilities in our trade, financial and medical infrastructure.
Most of the comments here are very throughtful. To me, it seems that major crimes were investigated by “task forces,” so there has always been a blurring of agencies. For example, any time money is involved, IRS agents are usually brought in to work with the bureau, etc. Task forces were both proactive and retroactive. For example, I think all GS-1811 (criminal investigator) positions from all agencies assisted in security for Olympics games over the years.
I think people with the most insight are those who have spent time in the fed. bureaucratic system. I tend to agree that it’s more of a “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Someone on NPRI, I think, said this new cabinet idea was created just to change the headlines. The headlines were about agencies blaming each other for dropping the ball before 9-11.
In response to the thread title (I like the metaphor BTW, I’ll have to use that sometime): I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned this.
I love it!
Exactly. Might as well call it the Department of Not Killing Puppies.
flowbark: the reason you haven’t heard about it is because the media does a lousy job of presenting all sides of an issue on those rare occasions when both parties in government agree with each other. The media has so developed into an adversarial megaphone for the two main political parties that when they agree the media stops investigating.
A good example: The ‘war’ on drugs. Both parties agree that it’s necessary, and the media stops questioning it.
I don’t like the near unanimity I’m hearing from the media on how necessary and important this giant department is. All I can see are new problems with this agency, but I haven’t heard a single criticism in the mainstream media. They’re not doing their jobs.
Hell yeah! I just don’t grok how it’s possible for the CIA to employ analysts who can’t read or understand the languages of the areas for which they are responsible for gathering intelligence. How the heck are they supposed to know what’s going on? It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!
This from Thomas Oliphant illustrates Bush’s politically-motivated flipflop on the reorganization, for anyone who wants to enter the “creation of wasteful government bureaucracies” rhetorical quicksand.
The Sunday 9 June Los Angeles Times had a long story on the difficulties inherent in creating such a Cabinet department. Unfortunately you have to register in order to view it on line and somebody beat me to the use of my own name. So I will eschew registering since I don’t want to bother to learn another name just to look at the on line version of a paper I read every day.
It is there if you want to look it up.