Homeland Security Watch

A colleague brought HR 8791 (The Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill) to my attention last week.

Although the legislation was in play last year, much of the proposal still remains classified so as not to tip off state, local, tribal, private sector, or other stakeholders about the proposed federal response to [redacted].

However, thanks to America’s finest news source – The Onion – additional details about the proposed legislation are available.

You can watch the video of Representative John Haller, from Pennsylvania’s 12th District, outlining the bill to Congress by clicking on the picture below.  If you have trouble viewing the video, you can read Congressman Haller’s remarks, reprinted at the end of this post.

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Preliminary transcript of Representative Haller’s occasionally redacted remarks:

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[By the way, Happy Day-After-the-Winter-Solstice, if that's one of the holidays you celebrate.]

On December 16th, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gave remarks highlighting DHS’ Major Accomplishments in 2009.  Below is a very liberal summary/interpretation of the speech.  Have a great holiday. = JRHF

‘Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the House
Not a person was stirring, not even a spouse.
The recess was called by Pelosi with care,
In hopes that Denmark would be quick by the air.

The Senate was huddled and focused on meds
As visions of health care danced in their heads.
“Yes” Nelson was voting, the bill was a wrap
As the Hill buckled down for a cold winter snap.

When away from the Floor there arose such a clatter,
All sprang to their desks to see what was the matter.
As they got on the Net, they just could not wait,
Flipped over to Facebook to see the updates.

YouTube showed the mall with tourists all aglow
They were walking and talking of sites to forego
When, what to their wondering eyes should appear,
But some Secret agents, with a piece in each ear,

With a new Secretary, so smart and intent.
I knew in a moment it must be Janet.
She was not by herself, her deputies came,
And she laughed and smiled as she called them by name:

Here’s Heyman! Here’s O’Toole, Here’s Fugate, and Morton!
See Allen, See Wiggins, see Rand Beers and Bersin!
Here we come from the NAC! To the top of St. E’s!
Now what a year! What a year! Don’t you agree?

As spring led to summer and hurricane season
DHS met obstacles with toughness and reason,
So up to the White House, the change has been coming
And homeland security is one thing that’s humming.”

She started explaining, for all the viewers
“The letters and hearings of our reviewers
Kept us all on our toes, on the Hill at all hours
We were wishing one Committee had all the powers.”

She was dressed all in pink, from her head to her foot,
And to her side was her second, Jane Hall Lute.
A binder of notes sat in front of the two
And we all just kept watching, until they were through.

The speech – how we twittered! Keeping up was a fright…
As she noted and quoted each thing DHS did right
She spoke of the year, and how things turned around,
“With “one DHS” we did build something sound…

We are strong and focused, from FEMA to border,
All in our efforts to keep civil order.”
She spoke of the progress, and what lies ahead,
Not a program’s merits was left unsaid.

“Progress- what success! Confront and defeat!
Securing the border is not a small feat!
Fusion centers improve information flow
Keeping states and localities in the know!

H1N1 we tackled with rapid response;
In the Gulf, I saw rebirth and a renaissance;
We started WHTI at ports of entry,
And of course, lets not forget Global Entry.

We took on the Drug Cartels down in Mexico,
Seized up the guns, the cash and the blow!”
A wink of her eye as she spoke of how hard
CIS has been working to distribute green cards.

Her words let me know I had nothing to dread;
As she spoke a little more about how DHS had led.
“The Coast Guard excelled at their missions,
But I must say – what to do with acquisitions?”

Her speech ended with the note “success belongs to us,
And I promise you that there will soon be more to assess.”
And I heard her exclaim, as she walked out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

Another point of view about border security, from the Onion News Network: “America’s Finest News Source.”

  Steve Flynn, Philip Palin, and John Brennan at Virtual Citronelle

As expected, Mr. Brennan was a bit late to arrive.  Steve Flynn joined me at the glittering, probably digitally enhanced, table.

“Your pitch has been vague Phil, what are you planning tonight?” Steve challenged.

“Whaddya  suggest?”

“Seems to me the context has seldom been better for American grit, volunteerism, and ingenuity in the face of adversity,” Flynn replied.

“And that’s not vague?” I asked smiling. “I’ve read your testimony and your books Steve, I expect Brennan has too, what’s new?  What’s the take-away?”

“Can I bring you a drink or an appetizer?” the waiter offered soothingly.  Flynn ordered a red wine.  I demurred wanting every synapse to fire as cleanly as possible.

Steve continued, “We have to gather and share as much threat, response, and recovery information as possible with private industry and state and local emergency responders. At the same time, it must place far greater emphasis on informing and engaging the American public. The key is to target the relevant audience with threat information that is matched with specific guidance on how to respond to the threat.”

“Psychological readiness is key,” I agreed nodding.  “The more we  think about a potential catastrophe, the less likely we will perceive the actual event as catastrophic.  The more we anticipate the worst, the more quickly and fully we bounce back.”

I’d lost him.  Steve was fixed on something over my left shoulder.  Virtual Citronelle is an immersive virtual space that mimics a real dining room. Sort of a flight simulator for policy wonks. 

“Hey Steve, good to see you,” Mr. Brennan reached out and they shook hands.  “So you’re Palin.  Ruchi says you’re not related to the Governor.”  Brennan’s digital handshake was more a quick grab than a welcome.

“Not in the last three generations,” I replied.  “I thought of Ruchi when I saw the proposal to spin-out long-term recovery.  Will that be her assignment?”

“Not my call.  I understand you think resilience is the solution to all my problems?”  His tone signaled impatience.

“Any chance of a dotted line between the Resilience Policy Directorate and OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs)?” I asked. 

“No,” Brennan answered, looking slightly annoyed.

In my experience directly launching a policy pitch typically fails.  It sets up a kind of seller-buyer dynamic.  And most Washington policymakers use caveat emptor as their mantra, whether or not they practice yoga.  If there is some way to actually have a conversation substantive progress is much more likely.

“How much of the current thinking on resilience draws on the British model?” I asked.

“None, as far as I know.  If Randy and Michele looked across the pond they didn’t tell me.”

“It’s a good place to look,” Steve interjected. “Whitehall defines resilience as an integrated approach to anticipation, assessment, prevention, preparation, response and recovery. Those first three steps are too often left out of our approach. We talk about preparedness, but we’re usually just preparing to respond.  Resilience is also preventative.”

“Back in 04 parliament passed a Civil Contingencies Act that fundamentally reconceived and reorganized what we would call homeland security,” I added.  My voice goes a little high and fast when nervous. “Crucially, they reconceived and reorganized around resilience.  We’re not there yet.  But  the results of PSD-1 could push us that way.”

“The Brits are doing a good job on going public in a rigorous way with real risk assessment and the beginnings of serious risk-informed decision-making,” Steve said with the calm of a more experienced hand. “It’s not a panacea, John.  But it’s a practical model that is in place and from which we can learn alot.”

Brennan was sitting back, a little more relaxed.  My shoulders loosened.

“That’s why I asked about OIRA — or really about Cass Sunstein.  If Sunstein is too busy, we need to get one or two of his best acolytes assigned to the RPD,” my voice had returned to it’s typical baritone. “What Cass sets out in Worst Case Scenarios and in Nudge is the why and how of an American approach to resilience.”

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked.  We were not.  But Brennan picked up the menu.  Looks like he will continue the conversation.  A small victory.  Maybe I will have a drink.

(This is most definitely a fiction. Apologies may be in order to Steve Flynn, John Brennan, and — perhaps most of all — to Chef Michel Richard.  Please see many substantive comments by readers by scrolling below, but especially here and here and here.)

In a speech on Wednesday Secretary Napolitano mentioned — mostly in passing –  how the Department’s currently scattered state makes coordination a challenge.  She told the Anti-Defamation League, “In a few years we will be headquartered in what is currently St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, which is going to be totally renovated and really converted into a lovely campus for the Department of Homeland Security with money that was contained in the stimulus bill that the Congress just passed.”

St. Elizabeth’s Hospital is the site of a long-time government insane asylum.  The potential for mordant humor abounds and, no doubt, will be bountifully shared whenever the Department makes its move.  Like an earthquake,  mordant humor cannot be prevented but it might be mitigated.  Response is often non-productive and full recovery is very difficult.

St. Elizabeth’s was the long-time home of the poet Ezra Pound.  Born in Idaho and raised in Philadelphia, he relocated to Europe following the First World War, eventually settling in Rapallo, Italy.  During World War II Pound authored a series of pro-Mussolini, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist radio broadcasts and newpaper articles.  After the Allied victory he was charged with treason. Pound’s lawyers mounted a successful insanity defense and he was committed to St. Elizabeth’s, where he lived from 1946-1958.

While living at St. Elizabeth’s, Ezra Pound continued to write, including perhaps:

What thou lovest well remains,
                              the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
                         or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
     Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

(From CANTO LXXXI)

During his twelve years at St. Elizabeth’s Pound hosted many of the best poets of the Twentieth Century, including Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote Visits to St. Elizabeth’s as a memoir. While Pound was in residence, Southeast Washington D.C. became a veritable poetic Lourdes.

Claiming this poetic legacy would be an effective humor mitigation device.  Each DHS meeting should begin with poetic verse. Congressional reports could be written as sonnets.  Oral testimony might become ad hoc poetry slams.  Could intelligence reports be so carefully crafted as to be nominated for literary recognition?  The  Poet Laureate would finally be recognized for his/her contribution to national resilience. How about awarding DHS employees an annual Ezra Pound Prize for Unconventional Thinking?  

Certainly such a strategy would  reduce gratuitious zings about the insane asylum.  I was glad to see that Philip Mudd fully qualifies for membership in the Professional Organization of English Majors (P.O.E.M.).  He is clearly the man to lead this mitigation mission.

Twitter — the messaging service with which users send each other “tweets” — was hit by a series of worm attacks over the weekend and early today.  According to a story in Computerworld, “Twitter again emphasized that while the worm attacks have been a nuisance, they haven’t stolen any user account information.”  But sounds like  it was a long weekend worthy of Looney Tunes. (Apologies to Bob Clampett and Warner Brothers)

UPDATE: According to the BBC, “Twitter has been given the all clear after a worm infected ‘tens of thousands of users’. But experts say the attack could have been much worse.”

Regular readers have referred to my ready use of the alliterative… with both raves and ridicule.   So you will not be surprised that when rating risks, I often write of, “natural, accidental, and intentional” origins.

Secretary Napolitano’s stubborn avoidance of “terrorism” in her prepared  testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee did not, as a result, especially trouble me.  But her choice of  “man-caused disaster” did strike me as an awkward replacement.

I was not alone.  The following rumination by William Safire will appear in tomorrow’s Sunday Times Magazine.  It is part of a longer column really worth a fun-filled read.

WAR ON MAN-CAUSATION  by William Safire

When Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of homeland security, testified before Congress, she caused a stir by ostentatiously avoiding the use of a certain familiar word central to the mission of her department: terrorism. A reporter for the German magazine Der Spiegel asked, “Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?” Napolitano replied, “I presume there is always a threat from terrorism,” and also noted that she had referred to “man-caused disasters.” She added, “This is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear.”

The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan commented: “Ah. Well, this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Noonan makes an excellent point of light: a word is not the thing itself. (That was the message of the general semanticist Alfred Korzybski, famous for “a map is not the territory.”) Renaming terrorism “man-caused disaster” does not begin to deal with the real thing that is terrorism.

Napolitano, however, is to be hailed for breaking the taboo that has afflicted the word man. Political correctness, driven by the abhorrence of sexism in language, has banished such phrases as the forgotten man, man on horseback, century of the common man, even man in the arena. The adjective manly is forbidden and mankind is out, replaced by humanity. Chairman finds its substitute in chairperson or plain chair (although The Times requires a writer to choose between chairman and chairwoman). The only acceptable use of man is when it is introduced by hu.

Not anymore! Thanks to the vocabulary policy adopted at the cabinet level by the Obama administration, long-awaited change has come to lexical misanthropy. With the start of what phrasemakers could call “War on the Word ‘Terrorism,’ ” Napolitano’s coinage of the compound euphemism man-caused shows we finally have a top-level politico who can do nuance.

On November 17, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and TSA Administrator Kip Hawley convened the next blogger roundtable, this time at TSA Headquarters. Topics covered Secure Flight, general aviation security regulations, holiday security measures, technology investments, and other issues. This may have been the final roundtable Secretary Chertoff convenes with the bloggers. However, it was the first time HLSwatch.com was singled out by the Secretary for a recent post with which he took issue. After the usually round-the-table introductions, S1 said the following with a smile:

Mr. Czerwinski: Jonah Czerwinski. Good to see you again, Mr. Secretary.

Secretary Chertoff: By the way I’m going to call you out on one thing. So you disagree with my saying that when I do risk, I put the most weight on consequence? And you said, but on Wall Street they disagree with that. They think it’s more a matter of probability than consequence. I rest my case.

Mr. Czerwinski: They may not be the people to watch–

Secretary Chertoff: Right. It was my position on consequence, which I’ve articulated for a couple years now, is what I’ve now learned that in the trade they call it the fat tail. If you read Black Swan so it’s inside baseball.

Mr. Czerwinski: I noted that, thank you.

Secretary Chertoff: All right, shoot.

Sheesh. Chertoff was referring to my 29 OCT 08 post entitled Chertoff Addresses the Beta, in which I suggest that he described risk assessment in his speech to the Wharton School in such a way that could trigger extremes of excessive caution or excessive spending. I made the ill-timed analogy of how risk is assessed on Wall Street. Oops. The full roundtable transcript is available on the TSA blog.

Fortunately, we won a small victory after that playful jab at my criticism of the Secretary’s risk assessment formula. The roundtable concluded as follows:

Secretary Chertoff: I have to say, people say, why do you do blogging? I’m not saying this to feed your egos. I said, I thought that by and large, in terms of focused, sustained, engaged, and knowledgeable questions, the bloggers who cover us regularly do a great job, and it is useful for me to get feedback because I actually do read these – I read the good ones, I don’t read the nutty ones – to get feedback about stuff that is working and not working, and I think that it is a great way for us to communicate, because we do get, you know, good questions come from a knowledge base. You guys do follow this stuff on a regular basis.

Mr. Czerwinski: When you hand over the “Leadership Journal,” can we get you to guest blog at some point?

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah, I probably will.

Fellow bloggers in attendance included:

Rich Cooper – Security Debrief

Barbara Peterson – Conde Nast Traveler & Daily Traveler

Matt Phillips – Wall Street Journal & The Middle Seat Terminal

Tom Smith – ACI-NA

Benet Wilson – Aviation Week & Towers and Tarmacs

Chad Wolf – Security Debrief

Have a great Thanksgiving everybody. I’ll keep up with developments and update HLSwatch.com over the long weekend if something is time sensitive. If, however, the next few days are as uneventful as I hope, I’ll see you on DEC 1.

Let’s lighten things up a bit.  Reader DA sent this link to a series of government warnings modified for everyday advice you’ll need.  Set down the HSC national planning scenarios and the DHS National Response Framework.  Pay attention.  These situations are far more likely to happen to YOU.  For example, how would you reprimand a dirty bomb?

And who says we’re not prepared?  In the event of a chemical attack, don’t underestimate the calm, stiff upper lip approach.  All’s not lost:

The New York Times ran a story last week making light fun of certain aviation screening rules (hat tip: Wonkette), one which described some of TSA’s more bizarre screening rules, including rules for snowglobes and most notably, helper monkeys:

Like dogs, some specially trained monkeys are classified as service animals to assist handicapped people. But you really have to wonder if these sample sentences — from the security administration’s rules for how transportation security officers at walk-through metal detectors should handle monkeys — were written with a straight face:

“When the handler and the monkey go through the W.T.M.D. and the W.T.M.D. alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening.” The rules add that security officers “have been trained not to touch the monkey during the screening process” and that “the inspection process may require that the handler take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection.”

New on YouTube, a Daily Show oldie-but-goodie on homeland security technology:

Enjoy.

As noted here previously, DHS announced the launch of the Secure Freight Initiative on December 7th. But UPI seems to think that this project has a different name:

The U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Energy have launched a new Senior Freight Initiative to boost port security.

Or could this be some distinct new initiative by DHS? Are the elderly going to inspect cargo? Or is DHS now planning to inspect them? What does the AARP think about this? ;)

The latest in homeland security-related humor, courtesy of Andy Borowitz:

Traveling Liquid and Gel Salespeople Protest FAA Rules

Angry Goo Sellers March on Washington

Two months after the Federal Aviation Administration instituted tough new restrictions on liquids and gels on all domestic flights, traveling liquid and gel salespeople marched on Washington en masse today to protest the FAA’s action.

The National Association of Traveling Liquid and Gel Salespeople, a group which represents over 150,000 of the nation’s itinerant goo sellers, organized today’s march, which began at the Capitol building and ended in front of the White House.

Carol Foyler, the executive director of the liquid and gel salespeople’s group, said that her association’s members were being “unfairly profiled” by the FAA and had every intention of making the “oppressive” regulations a key issue in next week’s midterm elections.

“Liquid and gel salespeople are what made this country great,” Ms. Foyler said. “America’s laborers built the railroad, but it was our moisturizers and hand creams that kept their skin supple and radiant.”

Perhaps true…but alas, they’re less powerful than the resealable quart-size plastic bag lobby…

Thursday night’s edition of Colbert Report had a humorous segment on the use of behavioral profiling in aviation security:

Enjoy.

Somebody at Customs and Border Protection has a good sense of humor about their job. Here’s a CBP press release from earlier today:

Snakes On the Plains! Pythons and Boas ‘Apprehended’ by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

SWEETGRASS, Mont., Sept. 15 — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers here “apprehended” five snakes Monday after being refused admittance into Canada at the adjoining port of Coutts, Alberta. A 24-year-old male U.S. citizen was attempting to enter Canada via automobile with the snakes in pillowcases when Canada Border Service Agency officers discovered he did not have the required export certificate.

The three Ball Pythons and two Red-Tail Boas are protected under the Endangered Species Act and require a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) permit to export protected species….