Homeland Security Watch

The Washington Post has a front-page story on worksite enforcement of immigration laws today, which puts the recent high-profile campaign to crack down on companies that violate the law in context:

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.

The government’s steady retreat from workplace enforcement in the 20 years since it became illegal to hire undocumented workers is the result of fierce political pressure from business lobbies, immigrant rights groups and members of Congress, according to law enforcement veterans. Punishing employers also was de-emphasized as the government recognized that it lacks the tools to do the job well, and as the Department of Homeland Security shifted resources to combat terrorism.

I think that DHS is now headed in the right direction on this issue, focusing on enforcing the law while also recognizing that there need to be legal means for companies to hire non-U.S. citizen workers for jobs that are unlikely to be filled by Americans. But as the story acknowledges, it has a long way to go. Flashy PR-driven mass arrest operations are not the basis for a sustainable worksite enforcement strategy. And there’s a risk that this renewed vigilance will wane if and when immigration and border security issues move out of the public spotlight.

On a related noted, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing this afternoon on the topic of worksite enforcement; testimony by the GAO’s Richard Stana includes many of the statistics cited in this story.

The Brookings Institution published an excellent volume on homeland security policy last month, Protecting the Homeland 2006/2007. The book provides a timely status report on the state of homeland security today, and its nine chapters span a range of topics, including intelligence, international homeland security, border security, and technology development. The introduction to the book is available on Brookings’ website.

The authors of the book (Michael O’Hanlon, Jim Steinberg, Jeremy Shapiro, Peter Orszag, and Michael D’Arcy) take a careful, studious look at the state of homeland security and find a more nuanced reality than that typically described in the political debate today. They offer ample evidence of progress in a range of areas, including intelligence, aviation security, and border security – and find many areas where progress is lacking. They argue that the amount of homeland security spending is, by and large, in the right ballpark, making the case for incremental new investments in a number of areas, but not a humongous spending increase, as others have proposed. And they discipline themselves, and prioritize their recommendations based on these budgetary realities – lending greater weight to the items that they do recommend.

Examples of recommendations found in the book include:

• Creating a separate domestic intelligence agency outside the FBI;
• Folding the Homeland Security Council into the NSC;
• Increasing the number of units within DOD dedicated to disaster and terror response;
• Developing a more strategic relationship with Europe on homeland security issues;
• Encouraging municipalities to purchase “mobile interoperability centers” rather than investing in multi-billion dollar interoperable systems from the ground up;
• Creating a “COPS II” program that provides federal matching funds to cities that create dedicated counterterrorism units within their police departments;
• and establishing, via legislation, a regulatory framework for chemical plant security.

Among a number of solid chapters, Chapter 4 on “Protecting Infrastructure and Providing Incentives for the Private Sector to Protect Itself” is especially worth reading. It tackles the question of why the private sector has underinvested in security since 9/11, listing the negative externalities that result from this underinvestment, running down the pro’s and con’s of the options available to policymakers to remedy this problem (e.g. regulation, subsidies, insurance), and testing the framework against different types of infrastructure. This is the mostly clearly structured piece that I’ve read on this specific topic, and implicit in the chapter is a framework that should be used to guide decision-making within DHS on critical infrastructure protection.

Overall, an excellent volume – the best book on homeland security policy in the last two years. You can buy it from Brookings or on Amazon.

The New York Daily News , Orlando Sentinel, and The Ledger (FL) reported this weekend on documents related to the trial of former DHS deputy spokesman Brian Doyle, which were released by officials late last week. Talking Points Memo has posted the full Sheriff’s investigative report and interrogation transcript . Reality is more bizarre and screwed up than satire. Warning: all of these documents are very explicit; put on your hip boots before reading.

The New York Times has a long piece this weekend that chronicles the exodus of senior homeland security officials to the private sector in the last 2-3 years. The story includes with it a comprehensive list of senior officials who have headed off to the private sector, and maps out senior-level departures against the DHS org chart.

The story mentions a number of loopholes in government ethics rules that former DHS employees have been able to utilize to their advantage; these loopholes should be closed immediately. And the story is a symptom of what I think is the real problem at DHS: the paucity of career employees, and instead the over-reliance on political employees and contractors acting as pseudo-employees. That workforce strategy makes this outcome predictable.

But that said, I don’t fault any person’s decisions to leave DHS, which is undoubtedly a high-stress place to work, and move to the private sector. It should also be noted that many of the people on the NY Times’ list worked in the private sector prior to joining DHS, and the Department benefited from their business experience – so it’s also natural that these same people would go back to the private sector. Finally, I’m not sure if the “revolving door” swings faster in DHS than in other mission-oriented parts of the federal government, such as DOD…the story provides no basis for comparison.

Author Ron Suskind has a whopper of a chapter from his new book The One Percent Doctrine in this week’s issue of Time Magazine which penetrates the inner sanctums of the war on terror and describes a terrorist plot to attack the New York subway system with the chemical hydrogen cyanide that was close to execution, before being called off by Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri:

[Al-Qaeda mole 'Ali'] said that al-Ayeri had come to tell al-Zawahiri of a plot that was well under way in the United States. It was a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. The cell members had traveled to New York City through North Africa in the fall of 2002 and had thoroughly cased the locations for the attacks. The device would be the mubtakkar. There would be several placed in subway cars and other strategic locations and activated remotely. This was well past conception and early planning. The group was operational. They were 45 days from zero hour.

Then Ali told his handlers something that left intelligence officials speechless and vexed. Al-Zawahiri had called off the attacks. Ali did not know the precise explanation why. He just knew al-Zawahiri had called them off.

Assuming this story is accurate, it confirms what I’ve believed (and many other analysts have argued) for a while: that the core of al-Qaeda is focused on catastrophic attacks on the United States – probably using nuclear or biological weapons – and everything other type of attack is secondary from their perspective (or detrimental, to the extent that it would lead to increased protection and vigilance). This story offers a strong counterpoint to those who have argued that the WMD threat is overhyped, or that we aren’t doing enough to protect “soft” targets.

And even though al-Zawahiri evidently called off this plot, this story also raises questions about what we’re doing to protect the nation’s mass transit systems. Even if the “core” al-Qaeda isn’t interested in them, per this story, they are still at risk from loose al-Qaeda affiliates or other groups. Last year the Congress appropriated $150 million for rail and mass-transit grants for FY 2006, via the Transit Security Grant Program. We’re now nine months into FY 2006, and DHS hasn’t even begun to distribute a penny of this $150 million (or if they have, they haven’t advertised it). That’s unacceptable.

Overall, a fascinating story – definitely read the whole thing.

Below is a list of homeland security policy events in the DC area next week (as well as the occasional listing outside of DC). I post a list each week and will sometimes update mid-week when I find new items. You can always find current and previous postings under the “Events” category tab at right. And please note that many events require prior invitations and/or RSVPs.

6/18-6/21: World Conference on Disaster Management. Toronto, Canada.
6/19: Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Immigration Enforcement at the Workplace” with DHS Assistant Secretaries Stewart Baker and Julie Myers et al. Dirksen 226, 2pm.
6/20-6/22: Homeland Defense Journal workshop on Target Analysis & Vulnerability Assessment. 7600 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, VA.
6/20: Merchant Marine Personnel Advisory Committee teleconference. 12pm.
6/20: House T&I Committee hearing on “FY 2007 Coast Guard Authorizing Legislation.” Rayburn 2167, 2pm.
6/21-6/24: AILA 2006 Annual Conference features keynote remarks by USCIS director Emilio Gonzalez. San Antonio, TX.
6/21: Senate Environment & Public Works Committee hearing on inherently safer technology and chemical site security. Dirksen 628, 9:30am.
6/21: House Homeland Security Committee hearing on “DHS Terrorism Preparedness Grants: Risk-Based or Guess-Work” with DHS Under Secretary George Foresman. Cannon 311, 10am.
6/22: Center for American Progress event on “Countering the Twin Threats of Pandemic Flu and Biological Terrorism” featuring the release of a new report, “Biosecurity: A Comprehensive Action Plan.” 1333 H St NW, 10th Fl., 12 noon.
6/22: House Homeland Security Committee hearing on “Reducing Nuclear and Biological Threats at the Source.” Location TBD, 2pm.
6/23: Heritage Foundation event on ” ’24′ and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism” with Sec. Chertoff, Rush Limbaugh, and the cast & producers of the TV show “24″. (Note: invite only). 1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW, 10am.

(Please e-mail me if you have suggestions about additions to this list for this week, or future weeks).

Shane Harris at the National Journal has the latest in a long string of excellent stories on intelligence issues in this week’s edition, only available right now by subscription, but likely to turn up on the National Journal’s sister publication GovExec in the next few days. (Update: now available here). The story looks at the parallel and converging efforts of John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program and Michael Hayden’s related efforts at the NSA in exhaustive detail, telling a complex story of patriotic intent, bureaucratic rivalry, technology challenges, and political pressures.

The story paints a fairly sympathetic picture of Poindexter’s TIA program, highlighting its speed and creativity:

In February 2002, Poindexter established a secure, classified computer network for testing analysis software and tools that might be worked into TIA. As the system came together, this experimental network would be the engineers’ Bonneville Salt Flats, a place to test-drive the state of the art. If tools passed muster there, they might end up in the design Poindexter had in mind.

“If there was a vendor with some great gizmo, they’d have to go through an arduous one- or two-year process to get that accredited by an intelligence agency,” said Robert Popp, who was the No. 2 TIA official and Poindexter’s deputy. “That didn’t fit our parameters. We wanted to kick around these various technologies to see their utility. The network could put it through that whole two-year process in a few months.”

And it describes an early real-life application of TIA:

As months passed, more agencies joined, and some began using TIA for real intelligence operations. For instance, in 2003 the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, which was established to fuse law enforcement and intelligence techniques in fighting terrorism, was interrogating detainees at the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Stacks of interrogation reports piled up, and the interrogators struggled to make sense of the information they contained. Some detainees frequently mentioned the same names or places. Some detainees claimed to know each other. Others didn’t. The interrogators turned to the TIA network to help sort out the hundreds of reports and potential leads.

“They provided the interrogation reports to analysts, and [the analysts], using several link-analysis tools provided by TIA, tried to discover interesting nonobvious relationships,” Popp said. Link analysis detects connections between people through common associates or backgrounds, and creates web-like diagrams of the connections. “The link-analysis tools showed the interrogators things that were not apparent to them — very valuable, useful information that they could then use in follow-up interrogations.” Popp said that the investigators also knew after they concluded their interrogations that some detainees were not terrorists, so those reports were used to create a sort of baseline for what a nonterrorist looked like. The tools could then be calibrated to disregard certain attributes and search for others that were salient, Popp said.

This is the appropriate and effective way to use social network analysis: as a tool for deciphering links among hundreds (or thousands) of people, not hundreds of millions.

But in mid-2003, TIA was derailed due to public scrutiny and a Congressional block on funding, and elements of it migrated over to the classified domain. (TIA had been unclassified by design, as a way to involve a wide spectrum of smart people and drive innovation). But some parts of TIA didn’t migrate:

But it discontinued some programs, most notably a multimillion-dollar effort to build privacy-protection technologies. ARDA also abandoned the effort to build audit trails in TIA, which would have permanently recorded any abuse by users.

As I’ve said before, it was a big mistake to shut down TIA; its shift to the classified domain has eliminated privacy protections, made oversight more difficult, and probably slowed down the pace of innovation.

Harris then uncovers the new name for the TIA network:

The experimental network’s name was changed from TIA, to erase any connection to its past. Today it’s called the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration (RDEC, pronounced ARdeck). The NSA is the biggest player, with at least 15 nodes as of December 2004, according to official documents. “I think it’s considerably more today,” said a former government official knowledgeable about RDEC. A spokesman for the NSA said he had no information to provide about the network.

….The Defense Intelligence Agency, which like the NSA is overseen by the Pentagon, is one of the largest RDEC users. In an interview, Lewis Shepherd, the chief of the agency’s Requirements and Research Group, said that RDEC is “the most successful attempt at bringing together a wide variety of analysts and agencies to work and think outside of the box collaboratively,” specifically on counter-terrorism. “[It] opens access to a variety of data sources to different tools that haven’t been able to access that data.” For example, RDEC lets analysts conduct repeated keyword searches on many different data streams, Shepherd said. It “sparks out-of-the-box innovation in how we do information-sharing.”

It’s difficult to assess RDEC beyond what’s discussed in the story; if it is an effective intelligence tool, and if it’s consistent with U.S. law, then it has a legitimate purpose and necessary role in the war on terror. But the apparent lack of accompanying privacy protections and audit trails concerns me; the NSA should take steps to add these features to the network, assuming that they don’t currently exist.

There are many other interesting details in the paper – as mentioned earlier, I’ll post an updated link to the full text if and when it appears online.

(Hat tip: Noah).

The House Homeland Security Committee is holding a hearing today to release the SAFE Truckers Act (H.R. 5604), a bipartisan bill intended to improve the security of the trucking system. A press release by bill co-sponsor Jane Harman summarizes the intent of the bill:

“The successful movement of goods by truck is vital to the American economy, but it presents a soft underbelly in our homeland security efforts,” Harman said. “We need to focus our limited resources on where we are vulnerable, and that means knowing who is behind the wheel of a big-rig with dangerous materials.”

The SAFE Truckers Act calls for fingerprint-based background checks for a limited list of drivers handling security sensitive materials (SSMAT). It also requires the Transportation Security Administration to issue SSMAT documentation together with the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, helping streamline security credentials for workers. The new bill also calls for verification of all transportation documents and civil penalties on shippers failing to do so.

This is a good bill, smartly focusing resources on the trucks that pose the greatest threat, and establishing civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance, while at the same time removing some of the burden on trucks that pose a low threat. Hopefully this bill will get some traction in Congress; perhaps it could be attached to related transportation security legislation (e.g. S. 2459 or S. 2791) currently moving forward in Congress.

Update (6/22): The prepared statements from the hearing are now available online:

Robert Jamison, TSA
David McClimon, Con-way Freight
Todd Spencer, Independent Drivers Association
Cynthia Hilton, Institute of Makers of Explosives

Pam Fessler at NPR has a good segment on the homeland security grant issue today, highlighting a House Government Reform committee hearing on Thursday, at which members of Congress from the DC metro area and NYC blasted Under Secretary Foresman on the grant allocations. The segment then moves to Charlotte, NC, which received a 60% increase in its UASI funds this year, and she interviews the mayor, police chief, and fire chief to find out how they’re spending their homeland security grant money – interviews that provide an insightful look at the mentality of the mid-size cities on this issue.

The Department of Homeland Security is submitting its Nationwide Plan Review: Phase II report to Congress today, a follow-on to the Phase I report released in February. The report makes 39 “initial conclusions” – 15 for state & urban areas, and 24 for the federal government – which strongly suggest that the nation’s preparedness for a catastrophic attack is still lacking in many ways.

The report was previewed in an AP story last night:

Most American cities and states remain unprepared for catastrophes, a government analysis concludes, calling the shortcomings in emergency planning a cause “for significant national concern.”

Nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks and 10 months after Hurricane Katrina, the Homeland Security Department concluded that nationwide response plans for major disasters are antiquated and often uncoordinated.

Although emergency plans appear to be stronger in 18 states along the nation’s “Hurricane Belt,” the analysis cited preparedness gaps in 131 state and city emergency response plans. Planning for evacuations, too, remains “an area of profound concern,” the review found.

The 15 findings for states and urban areas:

1. The majority of the Nation’s current emergency operations plans and planning processes cannot be characterized as fully adequate, feasible, or acceptable to manage catastrophic events as defined in the National Response Plan (NRP).
2. States and urban areas are not conducting adequate collaborative planning as a part of “steady state” preparedness.
3. Assumptions in Basic Plans do not adequately address catastrophic events.
4. Basic Plans do not adequately address continuity of operations and continuity of government.
5. The most common deficiency among State and urban area Direction and Control Annexes is the absence of a clearly defined command structure.
6. Many States and urban areas need to improve systems and procedures for communications among all operational components.
7. All Functional Annexes did not adequately address special needs populations.
8. States should designate a specific State agency that is responsible for providing oversight and ensuring accountability for including people with disabilities in the shelter operations process.
9. Timely warnings requiring emergency actions are not adequately disseminated to custodial institutions, appropriate government officials, and the public.
10. The ability to give the public accurate, timely, and useful information and instructions through the emergency period should be strengthened.
11. Significant weaknesses in evacuation planning are an area of profound concern.
12. Capabilities to manage reception and care for large numbers of evacuees are inadequate.
13. Capabilities to track patients under emergency or disaster conditions and license of out-of-State medical personnel are limited.
14. Resource management is the “Achilles heel” of emergency planning. Resource Management Annexes do not adequately describe in detail the means, organization, and process by which States and urban areas will find, obtain, allocate, track, and distribute resources to meet operational needs.
15. Plans should clearly define resource requirements, conduct resource inventories, match available resources to requirements, and identify and resolve shortfalls.

And the 24 findings for the federal government:

1. Planning products, processes, tools, and technologies should be developed to facilitate a common nationwide approach to catastrophic planning in accordance with the National Preparedness Goal’s National Priority to Strengthen Planning and Citizen Preparedness Capabilities.
2. Planning modernization should be fully integrated with other key homeland security initiatives.
3. Clear guidance should be developed on how State and local governments plan for coordinated operations with Federal partners under the NRP.
4. Existing Federal technical assistance should be used to help States and urban areas address the specific issues identified during the Nationwide Plan Review.
5. Critical tasks, target capabilities, and associated performance measures, such as those identified in the National Preparedness Goal should serve as the common reference system for planning and the language of synchronization.
6. Detailed planning assumptions and planning magnitudes for catastrophic incidents should be defined, such as has been initiated through the National Planning Scenarios.
7. Current preparedness data should be readily accessible to planners.
8. Regional planning capabilities, processes, and resources should be strengthened in accordance with the National Preparedness Goal’s National Priorities to Expand Regional Collaboration and Strengthen Planning and Citizen Preparedness Capabilities.
9. Collaboration between government and non-governmental entities should be strengthened at all levels, as outlined in the National Preparedness Goal’s National Priority to Expand Regional Collaboration.
10. The Federal Government should develop a consistent definition of the term “special needs”.
11. The Federal Government should provide guidance to States and local governments on incorporation of disability-related demographic analysis into emergency planning.
12. Federal, State, and local governments should work with the private sector to identify and coordinate effective means of transporting individuals with disabilities before, during, and after an emergency.
13. Improvements in public preparedness and emergency public information should be implemented in accordance with the National Preparedness Goal’s National Priority to Strengthen Planning and Citizen Preparedness Capabilities.
14. Federal, State, and local governments should take action to better integrate nongovernmental resources to meet surge capacity.
15. The Federal Government should provide the leadership, doctrine, policies, guidance, standards, and resources necessary to build a shared national homeland security planning system.
16. Identification of desired technologies, tools, and architecture(s) for the national homeland security planning community should be included in the National Priority to Strengthen Planning and Citizen Preparedness Capabilities.
17. Comprehensive national guidance on the potential consequences associated with catastrophic risks and hazards should be developed to drive risk management and operational planning.
18. Development of focused training, education, and professional development programs for homeland security planners should be included in the National Priority to Strengthen Planning and Citizen Preparedness Capabilities.
19. Collaborative planning and planning excellence should be incentivized. Funding and projects should be linked to operational readiness through a specific task or capability in a plan or plan annex.
20. Federal, State, and local governments should increase the participation of people with disabilities and disability subject-matter experts in the development and execution of plans, training, and exercises.
21. The Federal Government should provide technical assistance to clarify the extent to which emergency communications, including public information associatedwith emergencies, must be in accessible formats for persons with disabilities. This assistance should address all aspects of communication, including, for example, televised and other types of emergency notification and instructions, shelter announcements, and applications and forms for government and private disaster benefits.
22. The status of the Nation’s plans should be a central focus of the annual report to the President on the Nation’s preparedness required by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8 (HSPD-8).
23. Emergency Operations Plans should be a focal point for resource allocation, accountability, and assessments of operational readiness.
24. Performance management frameworks to support the National Preparedness Goal should measure the ability to:
    - Integrate a multi-jurisdictional and multi-agency response based on the intersection of tasks and capabilities in combined plans; and
    - Maintain operations in the face of disruptions of service, damage to the environment in which operations occur, or loss of critical resources.

This is a worrying list for the cities, states, and federal government, and it’s important now that they work to prioritize and address these deficiencies. This was a necessary planning exercise, to establish a baseline in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but now it’s time to focus on execution.

Update (6/16): Here’s the DHS press release announcing the report.

Update 2 (6/16): An AP story this afternoon adds details on how various states fared in this review:

New Orleans is still woefully unprepared for catastrophes 10 months after Hurricane Katrina, and the two cities targeted by the 9/11 attacks don’t meet all guidelines for responding to major disasters, a federal security analysis concluded Friday.

Ten states were rated in a Homeland Security Department scorecard as having sufficient plans to respond to disasters: Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont.

Florida, accustomed to being whipped with hurricane winds, was the only state to meet all of the department’s basic requirements for planning for catastrophes. Response plans for Louisiana, still devastated from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, were deemed insufficient to manage huge emergencies.

….New York and Washington, al-Qaida’s targets on Sept. 11, 2001, received lukewarm ratings. Seventy-one percent of New York’s emergency plans were described as only partially sufficient. In Washington, 67 percent of the plans were deemed partially sufficient and 2 percent insufficient.

Update 3 (6/19): Here’s the link to the official DHS document that shows the preparedness statistics for all 50 states and dozens of major U.S. cities.

Update 4 (6/19): A good post from David Stephenson on the report.

Sec. Chertoff has been traveling in Europe this week, giving a speech in Berlin on Wednesday at the German Marshall Fund and attending a meeting of the G8 Ministers of Justice and Interior in Moscow on Thursday and today. He previewed the G8 meeting in a confab with foreign reporters in DC last Friday:

Among the things I anticipate we will be able to talk about among the countries are the issues of preparedness, including avian flu preparedness, combating human trafficking, adopting new technology for better explosive detection during aircraft boarding, enhancing security on other forms of transportation like subways and railroads, working to mitigate radicalization and recruitment, promoting cybersecurity, combating electronic financial crimes and crimes on the Internet, more effectively frustrating terrorist financing operations and working more closely on critical infrastructure protection and consequence management.

He also indicated that he would be discussing the passenger name record (PNR) issue with his European counterparts while at the meeting.

The full agenda of the meeting is available here, and the Russian papers have been covering it yesterday and today. For example, the Moscow Times reports:

Protection of transportation and communication networks should top the list of security concerns, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said.

Sergei Sobyanin, head of the presidential administration, said Russian authorities had devised new strategies for shielding railways and metros from attack.

Nurgaliyev also called for fighting illegal immigration and Internet-based extremists and terrorists.

“The Internet is increasingly used by terrorists as a means to disseminate information containing detailed instructions for building bombs and other weapons,” Nurgaliyev said.

With such a long list of issues to discuss, it’s hard to imagine that much progress is made at meetings like this. But they play a valuable role in terms of building interpersonal relationships, and help to establish the kind of trust that makes it possible for officials to cooperate and share information on a routine basis. These relationships are themselves a critical and necessary asset in the war on terror.

I’ll post an update to this post after the ministers release their post-event “statement of recommendations.”

The Associated Press reported last week on a plan in Texas to install a network of webcams along the state’s portion of the US-Mexico border:

The governor of Texas wants to turn all the world into a virtual posse.

Rick Perry has announced a $5 million plan to install hundreds of night-vision cameras on private land along the Mexican border and put the live video on the Internet, so that anyone with a computer who spots illegal immigrants trying to slip across can report it on a toll-free hotline.

“I look at this as not different from the neighborhood watches we have had in our communities for years and years,” Perry said.

At a $5 million price tag, this is a pretty good idea. It’s essentially an extension of the distributed computing paradigm to border security, taking advantage of the fact that there are thousands of people with too much free time on their hands who would be willing to monitor webcams for no compensation. There’s some risk that this could lead to an increase in false alarms for the Border Patrol; but the existing ground sensors along the border already have a very high false alarm rate, so it’s feasible that this type of application could reduce false alarms, especially if the system established some type of ‘trusted user’ status for frequent camera-watchers.

The House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing today on DHS’s shuttle service contract with Shirlington Limousine Co., a deal that has raised suspicions based upon the contractor’s ties to the so-called “Hookergate” scandal (involving convicted ex-Congressman Duke Cunningham), and that I thought was overpriced based upon an analysis of the terms of the proposal. The prepared testimony from the hearing is available here, and summary coverage of the hearing is available in an AP story and two posts at TPM Muckraker.

From the AP story:

A limousine company involved in congressional prostitution and bribery allegations got a Homeland Security contract after then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham interceded on the company’s behalf, the company’s president has told lawmakers.

The statement by the president of Shirlington Limousine was made in an affidavit discussed at a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing Thursday.

It prompted renewed protests from lawmakers about the Homeland Security Department’s awarding of two contracts to Shirlington despite the company’s history of problems.

And from TPM Muckraker:

As revealed in today’s hearing, Shirlington President Christopher Baker told committee staff that he’d originally submitted a proposal to DHS in January of 2004 to provide shuttle services.

Here’s why that’s fishy – that was 3 months before DHS even announced that they’d be seeking bids for such a contract.

But it gets better. In March of 2004, Baker applied for HUBZone status for Shirlington – that’s a federal program whereby certain contracts are set aside for small businesses in “distressed areas.”

On April 8, Shirlington was awarded HUBZone status.

And guess what — one week later DHS posted the bid solicitation for their transportation contract. The contract was designated as a HUBZone project.

Two weeks later Shirlington won the contract.

There’s clearly something very wrong about this contract, and the hearing today strengthens my previous contention (which was conditional, since it was based on incomplete information) that the taxpayers are getting a raw deal on it. If there is evidence of a Cunningham tie to the contract, then DHS should terminate it immediately and hold a new, open competition – not using a set-aside program – for its shuttle services.

Update (6/18): Here’s the letter from Cunningham to DHS, recommending Shirlington Limo.

The Delaware News Journal , CBS Marketwatch, and GovExec report this afternoon on the passage of S. 2145 out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, by a unanimous vote. The GovExec story details one contested amendment which was voted on today:

The committee also approved, 10-5, another amendment from Voinovich affecting information sharing, legal reviews of chemical plant security plans and penalties for facilities that violate their security plans. Lieberman led opposition to the amendment, arguing it would weaken the bill.

He cited, for example, provisions on information sharing that he said would restrict the public release of department-issued noncompliance orders and limit the public’s ability to take legal action against chemical companies.

The stated rationale for this amendment was that it would provide a “roadmap to the terrorists” if DHS provided public notification of a non-compliant facility. That seems like a facetious argument to me – and I’d argue that stipulating public notification of noncompliance is actually good for security, because it places a greater burden on plants to comply, and it provides people living in the proximity of a plant with the ability to make informed decisions about whether they want to live near an unsafe plant – which seems like a fundamental public right.

Even though this is now a worse bill for this amendment, I’m glad that it has finally moved through committee, and it’s time for everyone on all sides of this issue to realize that they can’t always get what they want, and finally pass the bill on the floor.

Update (6/16): More from UPI.

The Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute has published a provocative and insightful new paper this month entitled “The Homeland Security Dilemma: The Imagination of Failure and the Escalating Costs of Perfecting Security” by Canadian professor Frank P. Harvey. Harvey summarized the key points of the article in a commentary in the Chronicle-Post (Nova Scotia) newspaper this week.

In the report, Harvey defines the idea of a “homeland security dilemma” as a new version of the Cold War era “security dilemma” (emphasis added):

The homeland security dilemma represents the post-9/11 equivalent for domestic politics in the war on terrorism. The paper’s central argument can be summed up by the following counterintuitive thesis: the more security you have, the more security you will need. Not because enhancing security makes terrorism more likely (although the incentive for terrorists to attack may increase as extremists feel duty-bound to demonstrate their ongoing relevance), but because enormous investments in security inevitably raise public expectations and amplify public outrage after subsequent failures.

He goes on to offer five reasons why this “homeland security dilemma” would naturally emerge:

Five factors explain why increasing investments (spending), political commitments (policy) and public sacrifice in the name of homeland security produce diminishing returns over time, each of which encompasses an important component of the current dilemma: (a) rising public expectations and standards for measuring government performance, (b) the power of failure (failures trump successes), (c) public imagination and exaggerated perceptions of terrorist threats, (d) political-military imagination and official overestimations of terrorist risks, and (e) declining public support for sacrificing civil liberties.

He later discusses the ways in which officials have “answered the call by imagining thousands of different threats,” and have the tendency to offer laundry lists of vulnerable assets, fearing the political consequences of an attack. But he, argues:

The real problem today, then, is not the ‘failure of imagination’, it is the ‘imagination of failure’ that continues to entrench into American domestic politics the main elements of the homeland security dilemma. Paradoxically, routinzing, bureaucratising and institutionalising imagination undermines the public’s sense of security while simultaneously pushing the government to spend more.

He concludes the report by admitting that he has no real recommendations about how to solve this homeland security dilemma, and dismisses the idea that it can be easily resolved either by giving better information to the public about the actual risks of terrorism or by more effective risk communication.

Overall, the report rings true to me in a number of ways. The general public’s expectations for security are very high as a result of the organizational changes, increased spending, and confident rhetoric over the past four years – and these expectations magnify every watchdog report or bureaucratic misstep on homeland security into a front-page story. It perhaps explains the attitude of many members of Congress, of both parties, whose calls for “100%” security in the cargo system or on the borders are driven more by the insecure “imagination of failure” than by rational analysis.

That said, I think Harvey misses the fact that homeland security funding in the United States has been relatively flat now for the last two budget cycles – a reality that contradicts his core thesis, and suggests that American policymakers might in fact be acting rationally. On the other hand, DHS’s promises and commitments have continued to grow at double-digit rates even as the budget has flatlined, which creates a gap between rhetoric and reality – a risky game to play. There are still a number of areas of homeland security (i.e. chemical plant security) where much more needs to be done, based on careful, fact-based threat analysis and irrespective of the psychological influences of the homeland security dilemma. It would be a mistake to take away from this report that the US homeland security budget should be flat-lined or cut.

The most important takeaway from this paper is that policymakers need to be aware of the possibility of the “homeland security dilemma,” and strive constantly to base their assessments on sober assessments of threats and vulnerabilities, rather than a falsely-drawn “imagination of failure.”

Overall, a solid report, which is definitely worth reading and debating.

The New Yorker magazine has an excellent long piece this week on port security in New York and New Jersey – not available online, but excerpted in this Q&A with the author. The story provides a good overview of the on-the-ground realities at the port, describing the various facilities that make up the Port of NY & NJ, looking at the mafia’s persisting influence on the Port, and analyzing the steps taken to improve port security since 9/11.

The most interesting anecdote from a homeland security perspective in the piece was this previously untold story about the so-called “Garment District Plot”:

In early 2003, a young Pakistani man, Uzair Paracha, was introduced to three Al Qaeda operatives in Karachi. The Al Qaeda men, who included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, said that they wanted to invest in Paracha’s family’s import-export firm, which had an office in the garment district. Uzair Paracha had grown up partly in New York City, and had a green card. He wasn’t particularly interested in jihad, but he was interested in the Al Qaeda men’s money. So he agreed to help one of them, Wajid Khan, establish a fictitious presence in the U.S. for immigration purposes. Meanwhile, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was seized in Pakistan, and he soon gave up Paracha’s name to interrogators. Paracha was arrested in the garment district in March, 2003.

The most interesting aspect of the case, though, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly told interrogators that his interest in the Parachas’ business—they primarily exported apparel to the U.S.—stemmed from his interest in smuggling explosives into the country in shipping containers. It’s doubly interesting, I think, because one of the Parachas’ customers was Kmart. Now, Kmart is one of this country’s largest importers, and, as such, qualifies, under one of the container-security programs that helps U.S. Customs decide which containers to inspect, as a “trusted shipper,” whose containers normally pass through a “green lane” in which very few shipments are delayed for extra inspection. In other words, Al Qaeda was poised to exploit this green lane in order to smuggle weapons into the United States.

This anecdote provides a compelling counterpoint to an argument which has gained currency in recent months: that the container security threat (at least as it pertains to nuclear weapons or materials) is overhyped. For example, Alane Kochems and Jim Carafano at the Heritage Foundation wrote last month that “the nuke-in-a-box is an unlikely terrorist tactic.” And Randall Larsen opined against excessive investments in inspection & detection in the Wall Street Journal last month:

What about nukes? I asked nuclear physicists and security professionals at a Homeland Security panel: “If you were advising al Qaeda on how to smuggle a Hiroshima-type bomb into the U.S., how many of you would suggest renting a 40-foot container and putting it on a ship bound for a U.S. seaport?” No hand was raised.

But this anecdote provides clear evidence that the master planner of the 9/11 attacks was interested in transporting explosives (or possibly worse) in cargo containers. Doesn’t this warrant a reconsideration of any dismissal of this threat?

To their credit, Kochems, Carafano and Larsen propose a number of other homeland security activities in which the nation should invest to improve port and cargo security, such as improving intelligence, strengthening the Coast Guard, and redoubling investment in counter-proliferation and threat reduction (e.g. Nunn-Lugar) programs. I agree that these are areas that should be improved, but not as an either/or proposition with improved cargo detection and tracking capabilities.

There are a number of other very interesting details in The New Yorker piece – if you follow port security issues, the June 19th issue is worth buying on the newsstand.