9/11: Domestic Reactions to 9/11
By Matthew B. Robinson, PhD
Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Appalachian State University
In addition to the passage of laws such as the USA PATRIOT Act, which
clearly erode civil liberties of US citizens in order to prevent
terrorism and to enforce ordinary criminal laws against “garden-variety
criminals,” the US government has passed and/or considered several
other programs to collect information on American citizens and to
prevent acts of terrorism. This document summarizes the following:
• Total Information Awareness
• Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program II
• Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange
• Department of Homeland Security
• Other Reactions
Total Information Awareness
According to the cached website of the Information Awareness
Office (part of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA),
the mission of Total Information Awareness (TIA) was to “imagine,
develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information
technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information
systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total
information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning;
and national security decision making”
(http://web.archive.org/web/20020802012150/www.darpa.mil/iao/).
According to the website: “The most serious asymmetric threat facing
the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections
of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to
identify and define.” Because of this, the Information Awareness
Office (IAO) was designed ...
to develop technology that will allow understanding
of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define
opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats. To
effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing,
collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and
actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the
development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a
proto-type system.
The website of the IAO lists the following as examples of programs to be utilized:
• Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries;
• Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users;
• Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition;
• Biometric signatures of humans;
• Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection;
• Entity extraction from natural language text;
• Human network analysis and behavior model building engines;
• Event prediction and capability development model building engines;
• Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning;
• Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance;
• Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management;
• Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control; and
• Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning.
After describing the threats posed by modern terrorists, who “are able
to move freely throughout the world, to hide when necessary, to find
unpunished sponsorship and support, to operate in small, independent
cells, and to strike infrequently, exploiting weapons of mass effects
and media response to influence governments,” the IAO website claims:
This low-intensity/low-density form of warfare has
an information signature, albeit not one that our intelligence
infrastructure and other government agencies are optimized to
detect. In all cases, terrorists have left detectable clues that
are generally found after an attack. Even if we could find these
clues faster and more easily, our counter-terrorism defenses are spread
throughout many different agencies and organizations at the national,
state, and local level. To fight terrorism, we need to create a
new intelligence infrastructure to allow these agencies to share
information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology
aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support
systems. This is a tremendously difficult problem, because
terrorists understand how vulnerable they are and seek to hide their
specific plans and capabilities.
According to IAO: “The key to fighting terrorism is information.”
Thus, to prevent terrorism, the United States must gather “a much
broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information
from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing
these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most
probable current or future scenario.”
Dr. John Poindexter was appointed by President Bush to lead IAO in
spite of his multiple felony convictions in April 1990 for conspiracy,
obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, defrauding the government,
and altering and destroying evidence pertaining to the Iran-Contra
Affair (the convictions were reversed in 1991 because the prosecution's
evidence could have been tainted by comments he made while under
immunity).
According to Wikipedia, some of the programs aimed at creating what Poindexter called “Total Information Awareness” included:
• Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or
EARS, has a stated goal of "developing speech-to-text (automatic
transcription) technology whose output is substantially richer and much
more accurate than currently possible." This program focuses on
broadcast and telephone human conversations in multiple languages,
necessary for the computerized analysis of the massive amount of phone
tapping the IAO now has the right to perform without a legal warrant.
• Futures Markets Applied to Prediction, or
FutureMAP, intends to "concentrate on market-based techniques for
avoiding surprise and predicting future events." It will analyze
data from the world's economy in an attempt to predict political
instability, threats to national security, and in general every major
event in the near future. The IAO's stated strategy for this
division states that "the markets must also be sufficiently robust to
withstand manipulation". This statement has been interpreted as
implying the intention of altering future events to further the goals
of the United States. It may also refer to the possibility of
persons manipulating the market mechanism in order to produce desired
predictions.
• Genisys code-names the database system which the
IAO plans to implement as the center of its information storage and
processing. Currently used database systems designed in the 1980s
do not have the capacity for the massive amount of data the IAO plans
to gather.
• Genoa "provides the structured argumentation,
decision-making and corporate memory to rapidly deal with and adjust to
dynamic crisis management." In essence, the IAO intended this
program to make conclusions and decisions based on available
information, incorporating human analysis, corporate history, and a
structured set of thinking. The IAO finished this research project in
fiscal year 2002; there follows Genoa II, which effectively automates
the collaboration between government departments.
• Human Identification at a Distance, or HumanID, "is
to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect,
recognize and identify humans at great distances." This program intends
to have the capability of implementing a face and gait identification
system effective up to 150 meters at all times by fiscal year
2004. One such program, developed by Georgia Tech at a cost of
nearly $1 million, identifies distinctive patterns in human walks via
radar.
• Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and
Summarization, or TIDES, aims to detect, translate, summarize, and
extract information in speech or text in multiple languages. The
IAO expected demonstration of machine capabilities and integration into
Total Information Awareness systems in 2003.
• Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment, or WAE,
focuses on developing automated technology capable of predicting
terrorist attacks, identifying predictive indicators by examining
individual and group behavior in broad environmental context. The
WAE will also develop intervention strategies based on the motivation
of specific terrorists.
According to Poindexter: “The Information Awareness Office at DARPA is
about creating technologies that would permit us have both security and
privacy. More than just making sure that different databases can
talk to one another, we need better ways to extract information from
those unified databases, and to ensure that the private information on
innocent citizens is protected”
(http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/poindexter.html). In spite of
such assurances, privacy advocates and defenders of civil libertarians
became immediately concerned after learning of the existence of IAO.
Part of the fears stemmed from IAO’s chosen logo, the “Eye of
Providence” or the “All Seeing Eye” (which also appears on the back of
US one dollar bills) and the Latin motto “scientia est potentia,” which
means “knowledge is power.” This logo and motto was removed from
the IAO website in December 2002 without any announcement or
explanation.
In part due to the reactions to the IAO, the name of the “Total
Information Awareness” plan was amended in May of 2003 to “Terrorist
Information Awareness.”
According to Wikipedia, the purpose of IAO is ...
to gather as much information as possible about
everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United
States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity,
credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals,
medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility
bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, the
IAO’s goal is to develop the capacity to recreate a life history of
thoughts and movements for any individual on the planet on demand,
which some deem necessary to counter the threat of terrorism
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness).
The IAO was halted by Congressional action in February 2003. Yet,
as noted above, this did not stop DARPA from changing the name to
Terrorist Information Awareness. DARPA mentioned in a report to
Congress that the program was not aimed at collecting information on
American citizens but rather to disrupt terrorist networks.
Still, Congress withdrew all funding for IAO in September 2003.
Yet, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC):
This does not, however, necessarily signal the end
of other government data-mining initiatives that are similar to
TIA. Projects such as the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data
within the Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development
Activity (ARDA) will apparently move forward. The FBI and the
Transportation Security Administration are also working on data-mining
projects that will fuse commercial databases, public databases, and
intelligence data and had meetings with TIA developers
(http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/).
EPIC also points out that: “The General Accounting Office has issued a
report that identifies almost 200 data mining projects throughout the
federal government that are either operational or in the planning
stage.” The report can be read on-line
(http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/gao_dm_rpt.pdf).
Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program II
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), CAPPS II
is “a limited, automated prescreening system authorized by Congress in
the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks ... [which] modernizes
the prescreening system currently implemented by the airlines ... [and]
will seek to authenticate travelers' identities and perform risk
assessments to detect individuals who may pose a terrorist-related
threat or who have outstanding Federal or state warrants for crimes of
violence.”
DHS asserts that CAPPS II was to become “a critical element in TSA's
‘system of systems’ approach to security which includes thorough
screening of baggage and passengers by highly trained screeners,
fortified cockpit doors in all airliners, thousands of Federal Air
Marshals aboard a record number of flights, and armed Federal Flight
Deck Officers” (http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=3162).
DHS assured visitors to its website that CAPPS II would only “ask
passengers for a slightly expanded amount of reservation information,
including full name, date of birth, home address, and home telephone
number.” This information would allow the identity of the
passenger to be verified, and a risk assessment to be conducted using
“commercially available data and current intelligence information” that
would “result in a recommended screening level, categorized as no risk,
unknown or elevated risk, or high risk.” According to DHS: “The
commercially available data will not be viewed by government employees,
and intelligence information will remain behind the government
firewall. The entire prescreening process is expected to take as
little as five seconds to complete.”
Risk scores were to be originally printed on boarding passes in order
to indicate the appropriate level of screening and then later to be
transmitted directly to screeners at security checkpoints.
DHS characterized CAPPS II as vital to “ensure that travelers who are
known or potential threats to aviation are stopped before they or their
baggage board an aircraft” because it provides:
• A stronger prevention system – CAPPS II will
provide a more reliable screening result than is provided by the
current airline operated prescreening system. It will seek to
authenticate a passenger's identity and conduct a risk
assessment. It also allows for updates as new intelligence is
received and the threat level is modified.
• Shorter waits at checkpoints – By reducing the
number of selectees requiring additional screening, CAPPS II will help
speed up the screening process for the vast majority of travelers.
• Focus for resources – CAPPS II will enable DHS to
focus its screening resources and as DHS is better able to assess the
potential risks to passengers and aircraft, it will be able to allocate
resources such as the Federal Air Marshals.
In spite of the assurances by DHS, the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) asserts that what is at stake is: “Your fundamental right to
privacy and your fundamental right to travel without being forced to
give up your constitutionally protected freedoms”
(http://www.eff.org/Privacy/cappsii/). The issue, according to
EFF, is: “How much of your private life should the government be
allowed to examine before you can exercise your right to travel
freely?” (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/cappsii/concern.php).
According to EFF:
CAPPS II could also misidentify you as a terrorist,
criminal, or other security threat requiring heightened government
scrutiny. Personal details about you, correct or not, could
repeatedly trip the security wire, yet there would be no effective way
for you to access your own CAPPS II file to correct the mistake.
Meanwhile, airport personnel would squander valuable time and resources
on you and other CAPPS II "false positives" rather than on real
terrorists.
The danger of false positives is summarized by EFF. They are not
“only unfortunate for those who are misidentified; they are bad for our
overall security. If CAPPS II uses faulty data in screening
passengers, the number of false positives goes up. With a
sufficiently high ratio of false to true positives, security personnel
might become conditioned to false positives and as a consequence, more
lax.”
Further, EFF asserts that:
CAPPS II could come to serve as an all-purpose
dragnet. Originally, CAPPS II was meant to serve as a tool to
prevent foreign terrorists from boarding flights. Then the
government decided that it would also be used to profile "domestic
terrorists," employing a fuzzy definition that could apply to
legitimate political activists. Then CAPPS II was once again
expanded, this time to include screening for people wanted for violent
crimes or for flouting immigration laws.
This kind of “mission creep,” as EFF characterizes it, is typical of
government bureaucracies who inevitably expand in order to
survive. The primary risk is thus to privacy rights of citizens.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) identified seven problems
with CAPPS II in the areas of judging Americans in secret, lack of
effectiveness to make us safer, mission creep, failure to provide due
process, enabling the government to create lifetime travel dossiers on
passengers, passing costs on to the public, and the likelihood of
discrimination
(http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=15426&c=130).
According to EFF, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that as
of January 2004 the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had
failed to meet seven out of eight Congressional requirements for CAPPS
II, including to:
• adequately assess the accuracy of information in the databases that will be used for CAPPS II;
• stress test the CAPPS II system and demonstrate its efficacy and accuracy;
• install safeguards to protect CAPPS II from abuse;
• install security measures to protect unauthorized access to travelers' personal data;
• establish effective oversight of the system's use and operation;
• address privacy concerns regarding CAPPS II; and
• create redress procedures for passengers to correct erroneous information.
The GAO report can be read on-line (http://www.aclu.org/Files/OpenFile.cfm?id=14941).
In part because of this, CAPPS II was terminated in August 2004 and
replaced by a similar program called “Secure Flight,”according to the
American Civil Liberties Union
(http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=17805&c=130).
The ACLU lays out four steps to Secure Flight:
1) Collection of information by the airlines.
The airlines will be required to begin collecting additional
information from every passenger. The agency is testing the kinds
of information that it believes it will need, but they are reportedly
considering requiring passengers to provide their dates of birth. (The
airlines may also pass along other information that is part of
individuals’ travel records, some of it potentially sensitive.)
2) Authentication check. TSA will send
passengers’ names and dates of birth (or whatever other information is
collected) to commercial data services – companies like Choicepoint or
Acxiom that are in the business of compiling extensive dossiers about
the lives of most Americans. The commercial data services will report
back to the TSA whether the information provided by the passenger via
the airline matches the information in the company’s own records.
3) Watchlist check. TSA will run the passenger
through watchlists maintained by the governments Terrorist Screening
Center (TSC), which is supposed to aggregate the many scattered
terrorist watchlists that the government was discovered to be holding
after 9/11.
4) Action at the gate. The results of this process
will then be forwarded to security personnel at the airport. Law
enforcement authorities would be notified if the system determines that
a passenger is on the watchlist.
ACLU’s preliminary investigation into this program found it to be
filled with errors and problems, and that it would be excessively
costly yet ineffective. One of the most significant problems is
that identity theft would allow terrorists to easily evade the program.
Due to such problems, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has
recommended putting the Secure Flight program on hold until the
Transportation Security Administration can assure the workability and
effectiveness of the program, as well as protect the system from abuse
and unauthorized access (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05356.pdf).
The ACLU compares CAPPS II and Secure Flight and finds they are
virtually the same
(http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=17845&c=130). The
problems identified by GAO for CAPPS II also likely characterize Secure
Flight.
Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange
According to Wikipedia, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism
Information Exchange (MATRIX), was run by a private corporation –
Seisint, Inc. of Boca Raton, Florida – on behalf of a cooperative group
of state governments. However, it is, at least in part, federally
funded – and may, in future, allow federal access ... The program has
received $4 million from the Justice Department. It has been
promised a further $8 million from the Department of Homeland
Security. In addition, news reports indicate that Matrix
officials have said they are considering giving access to the CIA
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistate_Anti-Terrorism_Information_Exchange).
MATRIX was to: “Tie together government and commercial databases in
order to allow federal and state law enforcement entities to conduct
detailed searches on particular individuals' dossiers,” including
“criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration
records, and significant amounts of public data record entries.”
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) described MATRIX as a pilot
project that would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to more
quickly “access, share, and analyze public records to help law
enforcement generate leads, expedite investigations, and possibly
prevent terrorist
attacks”(http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32536.pdf). According to
CRS, the pilot project identified 120,000 individuals in the United
States as having “high terrorism factor scores” in the weeks following
the attacks of September 11, 2001. It also identified five of the
names of the 9/11 hijackers.
According to CRS, the “core” of the MATRIX pilot project is the Factual
Analysis Criminal Threat Solution (FACTS), which allows police officers
to “more effectively query available public records with incomplete
information.” The FACTS database contains more than 3.9 billion
public records, including:
• pilot licenses issued by the Federal Aviation Administration;
• aircraft ownership;
• property ownership;
• US Coast Guard registered vehicles;
• state sexual offender lists;
• corporate filings;
• Uniform Commercial Cod filings or business liens;
• bankruptcy filings; and
• state issued professional licenses.
Records also include:
• criminal history records;
• department of corrections information and photo images;
• sexual offender history files;
• driver’s license information and photo images; and
• motor vehicle registration information.
Although law enforcement officials asserted that only public
information would be utilized in MATRIX searches the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote:
The MATRIX (Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information
eXchange) surveillance system combined information about individuals
from government databases and private-sector data companies. It
then made those dossiers available for search by government officials
and combed through the millions of files in a search for anomalies that
may be indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity
(http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14240&c=130).
The ACLU also notes that:
MATRIX appears to include a mix of corporate data,
court records and other data compiled by private industry, and records
provided directly by the states. This information includes
property ownership, address history (including all the people an
individual has ever lived with), business and corporate information,
marine vessels, U.S. directory assistance, public utility services
connections, bankruptcies, liens and judgments, UCC filings, FCC pilot
information, hunting and fishing licenses, gun licenses, professional
licenses, voter registrations, and U.S. domain names.
Although proponents of MATRIX argued that law enforcement would simply
be given greater and more rapid access to information already
available, opponents were concerned about “data mining” of information
pertaining to regular, every day Americans. MATRIX officials
claimed that the program does not include law enforcement data mining,
“in which an automated computer program scans through the records of
everyone – criminal and innocent alike – in a search for patterns
that are thought to suggest wrongdoing.” Yet, the ACLU notes that
documents they obtained “contain numerous explicit references to data
mining, including meeting minutes of the MATRIX board, presentations by
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and in FDLE budget
documents.” Additionally, “one of the four objectives of the
program that were listed [in a grant application] was to develop and
pilot test a model data mining and integration system for terrorist and
other intelligence information.”
CRS concluded “It remains uncertain whether the MATRIX pilot project is
currently designed to assess and address privacy and civil liberty
concerns.” Due in part to concerns about privacy, eleven of the
original sixteen participating states dropped out, leaving just five
participating.
Due to issues such as inaccuracy of data, privacy concerns, inadequate
security measures in place, the MATRIX program was terminated in April
2005, though components continued to be made available to police in
individual states. Thus, the website of MATRIX is no longer
active (http://www.matrix-at.org/).
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created by the Homeland
Security Act of 2002. The mission of DHS, according to this law,
is to:
(A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;
(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism; and
(C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist
attacks that do occur within the United States
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=59&content=411).
DHS was thus created by an act of Congress. Yet, according the
website of the White House, President Bush “created the Department of
Homeland Security – the most comprehensive reorganization of the
Federal government in a half-century. The Department of Homeland
Security consolidates 22 agencies and 180,000 employees, unifying
once-fragmented Federal functions in a single agency dedicated to
protecting America from terrorism”
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/homeland/).
Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sets a new standard
for organizational bureaucracy! According to the DHS website:
The following list comprises the major components that currently make up the Department of Homeland Security:
Office of the Secretary
The staff functions in the Office of the Secretary oversee activities
with other federal, state, local, and private entities as part of a
collaborative effort to strengthen our borders, provide for
intelligence analysis and infrastructure protection, improve the use of
science and technology to counter weapons of mass destruction, and to
create a comprehensive response and recovery division. Within the
Office of the Secretary there are multiple offices that contribute to
the overall Homeland Security mission:
• Office of the Chief Privacy Officer;
• Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties;
• Office of Counter Narcotics;
• Office of General Counsel;
• Office of the Inspector General;
• Office of Legislative Affairs;
• Office of National Capital Region Coordination;
• Office of the Private Sector;
• Office of Public Affairs;
• Office of Security; and
• Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness.
Border and Transportation Security (BTS)
Border and Transportation Security (BTS) secures our nation’’s borders
and transportation systems and enforces the nation’’s immigration
laws. It includes:
• Transportation Security Administration (TSA);
• Customs and Border Protection;
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and
• Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R)
Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R), building on the long
and solid track record of the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), ensures that our nation is prepared for incidents, whether
natural disasters or terrorist assaults, and oversees the federal
government’s national response and recovery strategy. It includes:
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP)
Terrorists strive to exploit national weaknesses and search for
unprotected areas to attack. Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection (IAIP) helps deter, prevent, and mitigate acts of terrorism
by assessing vulnerabilities in the context of continuously changing
threats. IAIP strengthens the nation’s protective posture and
disseminates timely and accurate information to our federal, state,
local, private, and international partners. It includes:
• Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC);
• Information Analysis (IA); and
• Infrastructure Protection (IP).
Science and Technology (S&T)
The Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T) serves as the
primary research and development arm of Homeland Security, using our
nation’s scientific and technological resources to provide federal,
state, and local officials with the technology and capabilities to
protect the homeland. The focus is on catastrophic terrorism – threats
to the security of our homeland that could result in large-scale loss
of life and major economic impact. S&T’s work is designed to
counter those threats, both by evolutionary improvements to current
technological capabilities and development of revolutionary, new
technological capabilities. It includes:
• Office of National Laboratories;
• Homeland Security Laboratories; and
• Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA).
Office of Management
The Under Secretary for Management is responsible for the budget,
appropriations, expenditure of funds, accounting and finance,
procurement, information technology systems, facilities, property,
equipment, other material resources, and the identification and
tracking of performance measurements relating to the responsibilities
of Homeland Security.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) ensures that America
continues to welcome visitors, refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers,
and new citizens while protecting the nation from terrorism, unlawful
entrants, and illegal residents. USCIS is made up of 15,000 employees
in 250 offices worldwide and is largely subsidized by revenue generated
from fees paid for immigration benefits. Within USCIS, the Office of
Citizenship was established to develop and implement public outreach
and education initiatives to promote U.S. citizenship. It
includes:
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services;
• Office of Citizenship; and
• National Customer Service Center.
U.S. Coast Guard
The U.S. Coast Guard protects the public, the environment, and U.S.
economic interests – in the nation’s ports and waterways, along the
coast, on international waters, or in any maritime region as required
to support national security.
U.S. Secret Service (USSS)
The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) is responsible for the protection of the
President, our nation’s leaders, as well as our country’s financial and
critical infrastructures, USSS is a crucial component of Homeland
Security. USSS is organized into two major components, one focused on
protection and the other focused on investigation.
The DHS seeks to “develop a complementary system connecting all levels
of government without duplicating effort. Homeland Security is
truly a “national mission.” DHS “leverages resources within
federal, state, and local governments, coordinating the transition of
multiple agencies and programs into a single, integrated agency focused
on protecting the American people and their homeland. More than
87,000 different governmental jurisdictions at the federal, state, and
local level have homeland security responsibilities”
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0515.xml).
DHS is currently undergoing a revised organization. DHS explains:
A six-point agenda for the Department of Homeland
Security is planned to ensure that the Department’s policies,
operations, and structures are aligned in the best way to address the
potential threats – both present and future – that face our nation.
The six-point agenda will guide the department in the near term and result in changes that will:
1. Increase overall preparedness, particularly for catastrophic events;
2. Create better transportation security systems to move people and cargo more securely and efficiently;
3. Strengthen border security and interior enforcement and reform immigration processes;
4. Enhance information sharing with our partners;
5. Improve DHS financial management, human resource development, procurement and information technology; and
6. Realign the DHS organization to maximize mission performance.
The realignment of DHS will “increase its ability to prepare, prevent,
and respond to terrorist attacks and other emergencies. These
changes will better integrate the Department and give department
employees better tools to accomplish their mission”
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0646.xml).
According to DHS, it is the Department responsible for preparing for
and responding to natural disasters and national emergencies. It
has created a National Response Plan. DHS explains that its plan:
establishes a comprehensive all-hazards approach to
enhance the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents.
The plan incorporates best practices and procedures from incident
management disciplines – homeland security, emergency management, law
enforcement, firefighting, public works, public health, responder and
recovery worker health and safety, emergency medical services, and the
private sector – and integrates them into a unified structure. It forms
the basis of how the federal government coordinates with state, local,
and tribal governments and the private sector during incidents. It
establishes protocols to help:
• Save lives and protect the
health and safety of the public, responders, and recovery workers;
• Ensure security of the homeland;
• Prevent an imminent incident, including acts of terrorism, from occurring;
• Protect and restore critical infrastructure and key resources;
• Conduct law enforcement
investigations to resolve the incident, apprehend the perpetrators, and
collect and preserve evidence for prosecution and/or attribution;
• Protect property and mitigate
damages and impacts to individuals, communities, and the environment;
and
• Facilitate recovery of
individuals, families, businesses, governments, and the environment
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0566.xml).
DHS also is the lead Department in the area of security of
transportation and travelers. Since DHS “inherited the
professional workforce, programs and infrastructure of the Coast Guard,
Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the
Transportation Security Administration,” it is now “responsible for
protecting our nation's transportation systems and supervising the
entry of people and goods into the United States. This is no easy
task given that 730 million people travel on commercial aircraft each
year and that there are now more than 700 million pieces of baggage
being screened for explosives each year. Additionally, there are
11.2 million trucks and 2.2 million rail cars that cross into the US
each year. Also, 7,500 foreign flagships make 51,000 calls in US
ports annually.”
DHS is also now “responsible for protecting the movement of
international trade across US borders, maximizing the security of the
international supply chain, and for engaging foreign governments and
trading partners in programs designed to identify and eliminate
security threats before these arrive at US ports and borders”
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home3.jsp).
Further, in March 2003, “the responsibility for providing
immigration-related services and benefits such as naturalization and
work authorization were transferred from the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS), a bureau of Homeland Security.” As part of this
function, DHS runs the US-VISIT Program, which was set up to secure our
borders and expedite the entry/exit process while enhancing the
integrity of our immigration system and respecting the privacy of our
visitors. Additionally, “investigative and enforcement
responsibilities for enforcement of federal immigration laws, customs
laws, and air security laws was transferred to the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) ... U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
assumed responsibilities for protecting our borders within the
Department of Homeland Security”
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home4.jsp).
Finally, DHS:
merges under one roof the capability to anticipate,
preempt and deter threats to the homeland whenever possible, and the
ability to respond quickly when such threats do materialize. The
department is responsible for assessing the vulnerabilities of the
nation's critical infrastructure and cyber security threats and takes
the lead in evaluating these vulnerabilities and coordinating with
other federal, state, local, and private entities to ensure the most
effective response. DHS encourages individuals to report
information concerning suspicious or criminal activity and cyber
security incidents to Homeland Security
(http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home6.jsp).
As part of this “Threats & Protection” function, DHS created the
“Homeland Security Advisory System,” which “is designed to target our
protective measures when specific information to a specific sector or
geographic region is received. It combines threat information
with vulnerability assessments and provides communications to public
safety officials and the public.” Components of the Homeland
Security Advisory System include:
• Homeland Security Threat Advisories, which contain
actionable information about an incident involving, or a threat
targeting, critical national networks or infrastructures or key assets.
They could, for example, relay newly developed procedures that, when
implemented, would significantly improve security or protection. They
could also suggest a change in readiness posture, protective actions,
or response. This category includes products formerly named alerts,
advisories, and sector notifications. Advisories are targeted to
Federal, state, and local governments, private sector organizations,
and international partners.
• Homeland Security Information Bulletins, which
communicate information of interest to the nation’s critical
infrastructures that do not meet the timeliness, specificity, or
significance thresholds of warning messages. Such information may
include statistical reports, periodic summaries, incident response or
reporting guidelines, common vulnerabilities and patches, and
configuration standards or tools. It also may include preliminary
requests for information. Bulletins are targeted to Federal, state, and
local governments, private sector organizations, and international
partners.
• Color-coded Threat Level System, which is used to
communicate with public safety officials and the public at-large
through a threat-based, color-coded system so that protective measures
can be implemented to reduce the likelihood or impact of an attack.
Raising the threat condition has economic, physical, and psychological
effects on the nation; so, the Homeland Security Advisory System can
place specific geographic regions or industry sectors on a higher alert
status than other regions or industries, based on specific threat
information.
Strangely, DHS does not include the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) nor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor does it have
control over the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Thus, three agencies that were clearly negligent in failing to stop the
9/11 attacks (even though they had information that could have led to
the attack being prevented) are not under the watch of DHS.
The original head of DHS was Tom Ridge, who announced his resignation
in November 2004. He was replaced by Richard Chertoff after the
first nominee to replace Tom Ridge (formed NY Police Commission Bernard
Kerik) withdrew from consideration due to employing an illegal
immigrant as a nanny and housekeeper (and not paying taxes for
her). According to the Washington Post, Chertoff was a federal
appellate judge who was appointed by Attorney John Ashcroft to head the
Justice Department's criminal division. It was Chertoff who
ordered the detention of immigrants – “not one of whom was charged with
a terrorism-related crime” and many of which were “beaten and
humiliated by prison officers.”
Chertoff also played a role in creating the USA Patriot Act, and
Chertoff subsequently “pushed for expanded powers to conduct secret
searches, steps that civil libertarians have challenged with some
success in federal court.” Chertoff also helped the wall which
forbade intelligence agencies and criminal investigators from sharing
information. Finally, Chertoff offered advice to the CIA about
harsh interrogation tactics used against high level al-Qaeda subjects
that might violate international law.
Prior to all of this, Chertoff was a tough prosecutor who won numerous
convictions of high-level offenders, including mobsters, and also was a
staunch critic of racial profiling
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49950-2005Jan30.html).
Other Reactions
Other reactions to the attack of September 11, 2001 include the
establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) by
Executive Order, and the naming of John Negroponte as National
Intelligence Director. This was a controversial choice because
Negroponte “was involved in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua
... and covered up human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained
operatives in Honduras in the 1980s”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte). According to The
New York Times, this is the man who carried out "the covert strategy of
the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in
Nicaragua.
The NCC has control over FBI and CIA intelligence gathering operations,
but it has little control over the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) (http://www.odni.gov/). The DIA continues to receive
the vast bulk of intelligence resources in the United
States.
President Bush also established the Terrorist Threat Integration Center
(TTIC) to synthesize information collected within the United States and
abroad about possible terrorist threats and the Terrorist Screening
Center (TSC) to consolidate terrorist watch lists and provide continual
operational support for Federal, state, and local screeners and law
enforcement. Each of these was suggested by the 9/11 Commission
as was the DHS.