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Homeland Security questions
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The department of homeland security is, in many ways, an anomalous agency, having
extremely broad reach with a remit significantly narrower and less active than the bodies that
fall under it. Although it has the largest information gathering network of the US agencies,
and the most wide-reaching civilian powers, its core remit is prevention of terrorism, It was
created to deal with a very specific threat that is extremely rare within the United States -
compare the rate of terrorist attacks in America to the rates in Spain, Northern Ireland, the
Middle East and North Africa, and Sri Lanka, for example. To put it simply; America is
under more threat from its own population than it is from any organised political group.
Co-ordination for disaster response was added almost as an afterthought, certainly in
the way it is addressed, despite non-terrorist disasters being far more probable. This precludes
meaningful organisational involvement with other agencies, both within and without. For
example, more lives would have been saved, and less economic damage done, if DHS was
co-ordinating disaster management correctly.
The first weakness, therefore, is operational. The DHS is simply too narrow, and this
limits the scope and action of its powers. A decade after its formation, people still do not
understand what it does, or why it is necessary when the NSA, CIA and FBI exist, when it
could be presenting itself as an integrated disaster and crisis management system, aimed at
preventing unpredictable but common occurrences such as natural disasters and food safety,
rather than the virtually absent terrorism. The presentation on the websites (DHS 2012a,
2012b) increases this distance from the people, bundling all of the disasters and security
problems that are actually likely to face Americans as secondary to terrorism.
The second weakness is the complex and constantly changing nature of society. One
of the costs of living in a society with free movement of goods, information and labour,
internally and internationally, is that American society changes at a pace that is simply
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impossible for a single large agency to keep abreast of. Attempting to gather massive
amounts of data has not, and cannot, improve the ability to stop attacks; as Lynch (2008)
notes, the way in which data are used is more important than simply collecting massive sets
of data. As noted by the Government Accountability Office (2010), a core concern should be
resilience rather than prevention
Ressler (2006) identifies the changing nature of oversight on the population through
the need for social network mapping being required in order to properly identify and track
particular behaviours, for example, and Carafano et al. look at internal (2003) and external
(2007) reconceptualisations required by existing in the far more communicative, innovative,
fast paced environment as the 21
st
century presents.
Finally, the largest problem is that regardless of how large the DHS is made it simply
cannot deal with a large-scale infrastructure shock, since there is no meaningful way of
anticipating the actual effects – both primary and secondary – of a particular disastrous event,
of whatever kind. This is true whether the disaster is natural, such as a hurricane or
earthquake, or infrastructural, such as a disruption to the extremely centralised agricultural
network, such as the 2010 salmonella outbreak (CDC, 2010). The World Health Organisation
(2002) presents a guide that heavily relies upon a proper assessment of vulnerability, but such
vulnerability is systematic, as the occasional food epidemics show. Although it is possible to
secure the food network, the Government Accountability Office (2005) notes that the most
of the countries that have successfully secured their food supplies are relatively small, with
high population densities, several external infrastructural routes, and low overall populations.
The DHS should be working at the lower level, creating plans and structures that can operate
almost autonomously rather than relying on centralised operations, in order to be truly
effective.
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Given that there has never been a recorded terrorist attack on the water system in
America, it is extremely difficult to judge whether the sector specific plan (SSP) (Homeland
Security, 2010). What is certain is that it adds a significant amount of pressure for increased
administration, changes in system structures, a new layer of oversight, and does not add any
additional capacity.
In particular, the objectives are either so vague as to be entirely unreal, or at least
philosophically complex (how can one prove that a thing is making you safer, if you are
already safe and have never known even a potential threat to arise?). Individual owners and
operators are responsible for both assessing relevant risk areas within their networks and
implementing changes. Since very few of these people will have been trained to think in a
military or strategic rather than logistical manner about their company, there is a very good
chance that this requirement will fail.
There is a significant amount of assumed partnerships, with many tasks delegated to
‘partners working together’ rather than creating a clear chain of accountability and
responsibility. If the sector specific plan focused on the purity of water, it would require
water companies to take large industrial companies causing significant pollution to be
changed or shut down, since these facilities pose a far larger risk to the water...