I am disgusted with Homeland Security’s new initiative, “Operation Predator.” It has a worthy goal – pulling together once-fragmented investigative and intelligence resources in order to target pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, immigrant smugglers and other criminals. But, so what? This is not their job.
It’s not like Homeland Security has all kinds of spare time. It’s not like they’re already doing everything possible to protect America from terrorism. In fact, I think they have an impossible job. There’s no way to prevent all conceivable terrorist attacks. But, that’s all the more reason not to distract themselves with unrelated duties.
In fairness, I suppose that “immigrant smugglers” could be somewhat related to Homeland Security. And, since INS is a part of DHS, that one is within their purview. But, the rest of this initiative just shouldn’t be done by this department.
For many years I have joked about “the data base project.” Everywhere I look someone is setting up a data base that supposedly will be a pancea. It never is. It looks to me as if the leaders of Homeland Security want to set up yet another federal data base. Why? Because they know how to do that. They don’t know how to prevent terrorist attacks. So that duty goes to the bottom of their In Box. Typical pathetic bureaucratic behavior.
Tom Ridge and George Bush are making a mockery of the Department of Homeland Security.
I was afraid of this. Not that I have any great love of child pornographers, but the thought of the DHS expanding into non-terrorist crimes scares me. Perhaps it’s my normal Orwellian paranoia, but I can see this organization getting way too much power and getting way overly zealous.
What’s the problem, december? I thought you quite liked right wing nut jobs. Or aren’t they are exactly the right kind of right wing nut jobs? Or is there some hidden agenda that I’m not picking up?
Well, the Secret Service has been involved in fighting internet child porn and has been working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for a while. So, in that case, if it’s mission creep, it happened before they became part of DHS.
IIRC, part of the mission for the DHS (at least this was bandied about early on in the planning) was for it to be a central clearinghouse for intelligence and investigations, whether they had to do with terrorism. Sort of what the CIA was supposed to be. This is most likely a part of that. Plus, as the Captain has pointed out, some of the orgs pulled into the DHS were already involved in this. So it makes sense to coordinate them within the DHS.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Department of Homeland Security is really an umbrella covering many distinct bureaus. Because of the departments that DHS came to subsume, DHS’s “job” macroscopically can never be only to prevent terrorism and nothing else.