Is America Any Safer?
August 10, 2016 1:44 AM Subscribe
By my calculation, over the past 15 years, the American government has spent $100 billion to $150 billion on failed or unworthy homeland-security programs and on acquiring and maintaining equipment that hasn’t worked. However, as with the equipment procured for port inspections, launching the TSA, and grants for protecting New York’s subway tunnels and running emergency drills in Boston, much more than that was well spent. Steven Brill takes a deep dive into the post-9/11 security state. [SLATLANTIC]
Srafe, the new Pynchon novel
posted by mannequito at 2:46 AM on August 10, 2016
posted by mannequito at 2:46 AM on August 10, 2016
Related, new from the House Homeland Security Committee:
Misconduct at TSA Threatens the Security of the Flying Public [PDF]
TSA data shows that misconduct has grown over time—both before and after a watchdog investigation. For example, in 2013, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that misconduct by TSA employees increased by almost 27% from fiscal year 2010 to 2012, and that TSA did not have the processes in place to adequately address it. GAO recommended that TSA establish a process to review misconduct cases to ensure that airport-level staff complied with existing policies, issue guidance describing the process for recording misconduct data, track cycle times for investigating and adjudicating misconduct, and reconcile completed investigations with adjudication decisions. GAO also reported that Transportation Security Officers (TSO) engaging in misconduct raised security concerns because those were the very employees charged with helping to ensure the security of the nation’s aviation system. GAO concluded that it was imperative for TSA to effectively manage instances of employee misconduct and take steps to mitigate future occurrences. Although TSA implemented these recommendations, recent TSA data shows that misconduct continued to grow by almost 29% from fiscal year 2013 to 2015.
According to information provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), TSA employees have been caught, for example, smuggling drugs and people through TSA checkpoints. One TSO was caught accepting bribes in exchange for smuggling foreign nationals through a TSA-regulated checkpoint into one of the nation’s largest airports. . . . Given that employees have engaged in this type of activity, serious concerns exist around the potential for TSA insiders to knowingly or unknowingly put the traveling public at grave risk. The ever-evolving threat landscape and increased concern about the insider threat to aviation security underscores the need for a capable aviation security workforce to detect and stop nefarious activity. As a result, it is vitally important for TSA to ensure that its workforce is focused on its mission to secure the aviation system.
I've read a lot of this kind of report, and this is one of the most damning that I've seen - I'm mean, even the chapters have titles like "Misconduct Occurs from the Top to the Bottom of TSA" and "TSA's Bloated Bureaucracy Cannot Effectively Address Misconduct". Betteridge's Law absolutely applies here.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:54 AM on August 10, 2016 [11 favorites]
Misconduct at TSA Threatens the Security of the Flying Public [PDF]
TSA data shows that misconduct has grown over time—both before and after a watchdog investigation. For example, in 2013, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that misconduct by TSA employees increased by almost 27% from fiscal year 2010 to 2012, and that TSA did not have the processes in place to adequately address it. GAO recommended that TSA establish a process to review misconduct cases to ensure that airport-level staff complied with existing policies, issue guidance describing the process for recording misconduct data, track cycle times for investigating and adjudicating misconduct, and reconcile completed investigations with adjudication decisions. GAO also reported that Transportation Security Officers (TSO) engaging in misconduct raised security concerns because those were the very employees charged with helping to ensure the security of the nation’s aviation system. GAO concluded that it was imperative for TSA to effectively manage instances of employee misconduct and take steps to mitigate future occurrences. Although TSA implemented these recommendations, recent TSA data shows that misconduct continued to grow by almost 29% from fiscal year 2013 to 2015.
According to information provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), TSA employees have been caught, for example, smuggling drugs and people through TSA checkpoints. One TSO was caught accepting bribes in exchange for smuggling foreign nationals through a TSA-regulated checkpoint into one of the nation’s largest airports. . . . Given that employees have engaged in this type of activity, serious concerns exist around the potential for TSA insiders to knowingly or unknowingly put the traveling public at grave risk. The ever-evolving threat landscape and increased concern about the insider threat to aviation security underscores the need for a capable aviation security workforce to detect and stop nefarious activity. As a result, it is vitally important for TSA to ensure that its workforce is focused on its mission to secure the aviation system.
I've read a lot of this kind of report, and this is one of the most damning that I've seen - I'm mean, even the chapters have titles like "Misconduct Occurs from the Top to the Bottom of TSA" and "TSA's Bloated Bureaucracy Cannot Effectively Address Misconduct". Betteridge's Law absolutely applies here.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:54 AM on August 10, 2016 [11 favorites]
He's leaving out the many trillions we've blown on pointless, counterproductive wars. What a waste. All the lives ruined, the wealth squandered, just to sow terror and destruction and hatred in the world. And we're still doing it. It's a stupid, mindless, stinking atrocity and there's no end in sight because we still haven't figured out that you can't make people love you by bombing and shooting and torturing them. Such a stupid, shameful, wasteful disgrace. We could have invested that wealth in something positive, something that enriched our lives and the lives of those who might otherwise be inclined to hate and fear us, something that brought people together instead of driving them screaming into the arms of terror and reactionism. Instead we squandered it all, predictably, on ruin and death and destruction, on feeding the cycle of violence rather than breaking it.
Disgusting. Predictable. Abomination. And a waste, a pointless unnecessary waste of people and wealth and time. And there's no end in sight, we just go on and on.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:16 AM on August 10, 2016 [39 favorites]
Disgusting. Predictable. Abomination. And a waste, a pointless unnecessary waste of people and wealth and time. And there's no end in sight, we just go on and on.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:16 AM on August 10, 2016 [39 favorites]
Defense related manufacturing jobs.
posted by infini at 4:40 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by infini at 4:40 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
Even the examples of "money well spent" are bogus. Some of them are pretty dubious, like the "1,000 person Counterterrorism Bureau", which (for all we know) may be as useful as the TSA. Others are things would have been worth doing anyway, e.g.:
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:41 AM on August 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
On the Upper West Side, an exposed bit of a pipeline running natural gas up the East Coast was encased in a protective shed, as was a vulnerable water main in the Bronx that could have flooded much of that boroughI suspect that it was infinitely more likely that the pipelines would have been breached by a truck or a lightning strike or whatever, but hurray for the Freedom Sheds that protect us all: that's good pro-active engineering even though the official rationale is nonsense.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:41 AM on August 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
The only thing the TSA (marginally) protects are the planes.
posted by askmehow at 5:20 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by askmehow at 5:20 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
That works out to about a $450 magic rock for every American.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:24 AM on August 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 6:24 AM on August 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is something I grasped fifteen years ago - that for a long time, we had a charmed existence. Our relative distance from other major military nations has blessed us with a natural protection; in our 200+ year history, we have only had fifteen instances of a foreign attack on US soil, and a couple of those 15 attacks were only border skirmishes during the Mexican-American War or random U-Boats taking pot-shots at Cape Cod in 1916. For us, "war" has most often meant "The US goes to some other country and does the fighting there" and the rest of us are spared.
But for most of the rest of the world, "war" is something that can also happen to your home country. Even just "terrorism" too - the U.K. suffered from the Blitz in the 40's, but also from terrorist attacks from the IRA in the 70s and 80s. Germany had Dresden. Italy had World War II. France had both world wars. So did Japan. You'd be hard-pressed to find a country in Eastern Europe or the African Continent that hasn't seen bloody conflict with an outside military force. And Russia saw not just two world wars but also a couple Napoleons before that. And all too often, for some countries, the outside military force is us.
Fifteen years ago, what I thought was that 9/11 was going to finally give us a taste of the real impact of war that the rest of the world had suffered, and which we had been spared from to that point. My hope was that it was going to temper our military might, now that we knew what it felt like to have our homes be the ones at risk.
No such luck, of course.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:00 AM on August 10, 2016 [19 favorites]
But for most of the rest of the world, "war" is something that can also happen to your home country. Even just "terrorism" too - the U.K. suffered from the Blitz in the 40's, but also from terrorist attacks from the IRA in the 70s and 80s. Germany had Dresden. Italy had World War II. France had both world wars. So did Japan. You'd be hard-pressed to find a country in Eastern Europe or the African Continent that hasn't seen bloody conflict with an outside military force. And Russia saw not just two world wars but also a couple Napoleons before that. And all too often, for some countries, the outside military force is us.
Fifteen years ago, what I thought was that 9/11 was going to finally give us a taste of the real impact of war that the rest of the world had suffered, and which we had been spared from to that point. My hope was that it was going to temper our military might, now that we knew what it felt like to have our homes be the ones at risk.
No such luck, of course.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:00 AM on August 10, 2016 [19 favorites]
Actually the TSA was founded on graft, so misconduct sounds par for the course.
As an aside, the FBI has always been a political beast : Hoover originally focused the FBI on useless cases to improve their numbers, like finding stolen cars. Today the FBI is even less useful. they spend their time talking idiots into thinking acting like terrorists, so they arrest some fake terrorists.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
As an aside, the FBI has always been a political beast : Hoover originally focused the FBI on useless cases to improve their numbers, like finding stolen cars. Today the FBI is even less useful. they spend their time talking idiots into thinking acting like terrorists, so they arrest some fake terrorists.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
Germany had Dresden.
Not just Dresden. Dresden probably represented about 5-8% of German civilian deaths from allied aerial bombardment. That doesn't account for those getting in the way of invasion from either direction.
posted by biffa at 7:53 AM on August 10, 2016
Not just Dresden. Dresden probably represented about 5-8% of German civilian deaths from allied aerial bombardment. That doesn't account for those getting in the way of invasion from either direction.
posted by biffa at 7:53 AM on August 10, 2016
(West) Germany had the Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhoff terrorist gangs.
posted by monotreme at 8:38 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by monotreme at 8:38 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
Getting on the PATH train the other day, I came down the stairs to find a cop in full GestapoGear carrying a ginormous assault shotgun, bristling with shotgun shells. I was terrified. Then, noticing my own reaction, I laughed. Then the cop looked directly at me. Then I was terrified again.
Good work, guys, good work. Mission Accomplished.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:07 AM on August 10, 2016 [11 favorites]
Good work, guys, good work. Mission Accomplished.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:07 AM on August 10, 2016 [11 favorites]
Well, it's a really good article. But most of it could be summarized by this brief excerpt:
“We knew it was a stopgap, but we felt we had to put something out there” at the time, says Ridge, who was the homeland-security secretary until the beginning of 2005. “But 13 years, and nothing better? Come on!”
Does it even matter what he's referring to?
"Don't just stand there, do something!" + "Here's some money" works about as well as you'd expect.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:19 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
“We knew it was a stopgap, but we felt we had to put something out there” at the time, says Ridge, who was the homeland-security secretary until the beginning of 2005. “But 13 years, and nothing better? Come on!”
Does it even matter what he's referring to?
"Don't just stand there, do something!" + "Here's some money" works about as well as you'd expect.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:19 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
Defense-related manufacturing jobs might as well be hole-digging-and-filling jobs. Defense manufacturing is literally the conversion of wealth, time, and resources into things that are designed to be destroyed. It's like saying that setting money on fire is good for the economy because of all the jobs it creates in the money-burning industry.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:21 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:21 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
Oh, except that when you set money on fire it doesn't normally burn down entire cities, whereas the products of defense manufacturing frequently do exactly that.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:23 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:23 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
This was a fascinating article. I don't think we're going to have a WWIII, I think the biggest threat to the US - which, based on how limited the attacks are - is going to be random terrorism. The problem is that it's completely unpredictable and can never be effectively prevented. We'll suffer a million bee stings before our next mauling (Russian bear visual intended.)
posted by bendy at 4:13 PM on August 10, 2016
posted by bendy at 4:13 PM on August 10, 2016
Some interesting statements in the article that give a view into the mindset of law enforcement:
on September 10, FBI officials declared at a congressional briefing that the most imminent domestic terrorism threat was from animal-rights activists.
How they could say that after Timothy McVeigh, etc. mystifies me
The inspectors were great at finding cocaine hidden in limes from Ecuador.
So that's why cocaine has always been so hard to find in this country!
But more importantly, were are pretty much as safe from terrorism now as we were before 9/11 because it is nowhere near the threat that it is portrayed to be. As horrific as 9/11 was, it remains an outlier. About 3000 people died that day; since then only about 500 more Americans have died worldwide in terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the number of gun deaths in this country has remained pretty steady at around 30,000 per year, so over 400,000 Americans have been shot to death in the same period. But because we let Ted Nugent dictate firearms regulation in this country, we throw billions of dollars at the 3500 figure, and mostly ignore the 400,000 number.
posted by TedW at 6:09 AM on August 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
on September 10, FBI officials declared at a congressional briefing that the most imminent domestic terrorism threat was from animal-rights activists.
How they could say that after Timothy McVeigh, etc. mystifies me
The inspectors were great at finding cocaine hidden in limes from Ecuador.
So that's why cocaine has always been so hard to find in this country!
But more importantly, were are pretty much as safe from terrorism now as we were before 9/11 because it is nowhere near the threat that it is portrayed to be. As horrific as 9/11 was, it remains an outlier. About 3000 people died that day; since then only about 500 more Americans have died worldwide in terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the number of gun deaths in this country has remained pretty steady at around 30,000 per year, so over 400,000 Americans have been shot to death in the same period. But because we let Ted Nugent dictate firearms regulation in this country, we throw billions of dollars at the 3500 figure, and mostly ignore the 400,000 number.
posted by TedW at 6:09 AM on August 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
The TSA is the Baltimore Police Department of federal agencies.
posted by rhizome at 3:37 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by rhizome at 3:37 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
While I generally have respected Brill, he notes early on in the piece that he has a 15-year engagement with the TSA. He recounts an early post-9/11 reporting gig with admiring nostalgia before noting his return to the agency more recently in an entrepeneurial role, pitching a steamlined vetted-traveler check-in product. He extends the same tone of admiration to the overall 9/11 governmental response before turning to hold up first Scooter Libby and then eventually Judith Miller among others as sterling and sober-sided tribunes, advancing responsible national security policies and agendas.
So at that point, having established that Brill has had both a professional interest as a journalist and as a businessman in promoting the post-9/11 national security state and that his extension of respectful professional encomiums to some key players in delivering the Iraq war can be reasonably seen to acknowledge which side of his bread the butter is applied to, I noped out.
Sorry, Steven. That's what I would call diluting your brand.
posted by mwhybark at 9:55 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
So at that point, having established that Brill has had both a professional interest as a journalist and as a businessman in promoting the post-9/11 national security state and that his extension of respectful professional encomiums to some key players in delivering the Iraq war can be reasonably seen to acknowledge which side of his bread the butter is applied to, I noped out.
Sorry, Steven. That's what I would call diluting your brand.
posted by mwhybark at 9:55 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
America appears less safe due to the FBI's efforts at home too :
FBI Agent Goaded Garland Shooter to “Tear Up Texas,” Raising New Alarms About Bureau’s Methods
posted by jeffburdges at 6:51 AM on August 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
FBI Agent Goaded Garland Shooter to “Tear Up Texas,” Raising New Alarms About Bureau’s Methods
posted by jeffburdges at 6:51 AM on August 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
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