NOVEL THINKING

Can the tens of billions for FirstNet or for “homeland security” grants for toys like that monster fire truck in rural Virginia be justified as smarter investments than replacing the lead pipes in a significant portion of the nation’s water systems? As Tom Ridge told me, “Democracies tend to be reactive, not prescriptive, and that’s a homeland-security problem that will be with us forever.”. The fortified cockpit door offers a final security layer. All in all, I think we really are a well-oiled anti-terror machine.”. But no one in Washington seems willing to rank threats in terms of the relative risk they pose. Yet training thousands of men (and some women) for armed combat in the sky and then having them travel (mostly in first class, to be near the cockpit) on endless flights every day does seem to be overkill, especially when all cockpits have been fortified to prevent the kind of forced entry that precipitated the buildup of the marshal force. The flow of federal funds to major cities has plugged innumerable security gaps. His successor, Michael Chertoff, a former federal appeals judge and head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division, prioritized tighter management, but ended up overwhelmed during most of his tenure by his department’s failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “These savages,” he says, “have so far only figured out how to use the internet to proselytize, not to wreak physical damage. This is why the thousands of small radiation monitors that police in cities like New York now carry may be an important tool for detecting unshielded illicit material, but are unlikely to detect a dirty bomb, because the low levels of radiation necessary for such a device are not difficult to shield. Mitigation and recovery need to be about more than repairing physical damage. But those requirements have been consistently criticized by independent security experts—and by the government’s own experts at the NNSA—as dangerously lax. In fact, most government agencies initially defied a presidential directive and refused to even install the much-derided Einstein. Never warp your brain with time zone math again. Many such threats remain, including the bioterror attack that the Libby panel warned of last year. There was no playbook. “For me, San Bernardino was the game changer,” Ray Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner, told me. Put differently, terrorists can kill 300 people a month by scaring us off airplanes—and that’s in addition to the economic havoc that fear of flying produces. It’s one of the ways we can show terrorists that they will not succeed—that Americans get back up and we carry on, no matter what.”. between the given dates and also the numbers of weeks, months and years. The math doesn’t allow it. “It put the whole country in the target zone.”. The question is how much of that was wasted and how much should have been used on other programs to address other security gaps.”. Even responders who aren’t sick have the option of enrolling for annual physicals that include blood work, a breathing test, and an in-depth health questionnaire. Carlos T. Fernandez, the FBI special agent in charge of the New York–based counterterrorism division, which runs the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, told me he is “not sure” of Miller’s count, and that “there were many [cases] where we were both working leads”—which, he added, “is really the point: The big change since 9/11 is how we work together.”. They tried to put the best gloss on a scary reality. To secure the subways in New York, we would have to create a whole other TSA. Any moron could make the pressure-cooker bomb those idiots used in Boston. Hiring and training to get back to staffing levels sufficient to cut the current wait times while maintaining security will take at least until the beginning of next year. Reginald Brothers, the Homeland Security Department’s undersecretary for science and technology, replied that he was now sending out still more such requests. The guideline revisions, which were published in the Federal Register, cited advances in understanding the science of radiation and also a new focus on a “broader range of radiological emergencies, including terrorist acts.”. It’s that mentality that we have to change and get on offense against the Islamic State if we don’t want to see a Brussels-style attack here.”. Across the country, small towns have loaded up on everything from a “latrine on wheels” in Fort Worth, to fish tanks in Seguin, Texas (presumably to help counterterrorism cops relax? But the NNSA itself can impose no security requirements. That’s one of the problems, that the different manifestations are so myriad and so broad.”, Read more: PTSD can last for years for people who witness attacks like 9/11 ». “But until someone engineers one of these pathogens and releases it, we’re not likely to do anything more.”. leap year. Some sit at screens looking for trouble as they monitor the innards of dozens of federal agencies (except the Defense Department, which has its own cybersecurity apparatus). Here are excerpts from an eye-opening report highlighting one of those continuing gaps, which I bet you never heard about, even though it was issued less than a year ago: The report then offered a stinging indictment of America’s security apparatus: The report was written by an all-star bipartisan panel consisting of, among others, Tom Ridge, the founding secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Joe Lieberman, the former chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee; Donna Shalala, who served as the secretary of health and human services under Bill Clinton; and Tom Daschle, the Democratic former Senate majority leader. But it was seen as better than the alternatives of saying nothing or telling everyone, including the bad guys, specifically what the government knew. “But we’re also called upon to figure out which pieces of hay might someday become needles.”. Separate squads track ISIL and al-Qaeda. What happens when they figure out how to use it to break into a chemical plant, or a blood bank and change the blood types? Less than nine years later, when Scott was 47, he found out he had colorectal cancer. Imagine if just a few of these people got together and shot up a few malls the same day around the country. Can’t we have tougher procurement contracts, so that Boeing and Lockheed Martin would have to give the money back when their products don’t work, so the country could direct those billions to hiring more FBI agents or perhaps to expanding early-childhood education? We go about our lives oblivious to the threats that are their obsession—until the next catastrophe produces headlines. McCabe stared out his office window at the pier below, loaded with more than 7,000 cargo containers that had arrived from all over the world, and began what was probably America’s first exercise in post-9/11 profiling. True, certain clues suggested that Mateen might be a threat—but they were no clearer than the hints about the thousands of people like him who hit the FBI’s now-vigilant radar screens every week. When the government awarded the coveted contract to Boeing in 2006 (to replace a failed $2.5 billion program started in 2004), President Bush heralded it as “the most technologically advanced border project ever.” Once deployed, however, the system’s sensors set off alarms when all varieties of wildlife moved around, and its cameras swayed in the wind and failed to provide visibility in areas where the land wasn’t level. If a dirty bomb goes off in Washington or on Wall Street, the question of why the standards that one federal agency (the NNSA) believes are necessary are higher than those of the federal agency (the NRC) that can actually regulate toxic material will no doubt be the subject of another blue-ribbon commission. “The fact that they’re morons is academic. The Created datetime for the first row is '2013-07-01 00:00:00.000' (Midnight) and I'm trying to query for items with a time between 11PM and 7AM. Some morale problems at DHS may have less to do with management and congressional harassment and more to do with the nature of DHS’s mission. You may have heard that baking soda and other alkaline foods can help prevent, treat, or even cure cancer. A long-running contract awarded to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to build new Coast Guard cutters has so far come in $1 billion above its $4.7 billion budget and four years late. “People are unsettled, unmoored. He’s learned of other 9/11 firefighters who passed away from the same cancer he had. A proposal to expand the FAA list to include those additional names had been sitting for months in the inbox of an FAA security official. Has it worked? Yet it’s worth playing not only because some vulnerabilities are far more serious and likely to be exploited than others, but because the two most-talked-about threats of the moment—lone wolves and cyberterrorism—so dominate headlines that they may have unduly diverted our focus from bigger dangers. It is astonishing that so many hospitals have refused to spend what Bieniawski says is the $300,000 to $400,000 necessary per site to increase security, and the $250,000 necessary to replace a cesium-chloride blood irradiator with an equivalent FDA-approved nonradiological device, especially because the hospitals that use this material for advanced treatments are typically large enterprises with tens of millions of dollars in annual operating profit. They held their first meetings standing in an empty room in the Department of Transportation’s headquarters, clutching laptops—until someone gave up on the glacial government procurement system and went to a local Staples and ordered chairs and desks with his own credit card. And they don’t have to come here to do it.”. A born-and-raised New Yorker, Scott was 39 years old and an NYFD firefighter during the 9/11 attacks. The arrival of Attack 2 to extinguish Clarke’s bagel was proof that homeland security had morphed from an emergency mission into politics as usual. This same spirit moved members of Congress to pass piles of bipartisan legislation and assemble on the Capitol steps the night of the attacks, holding hands and singing “God Bless America.”. But because of popular perception, an explosion would unleash panic—which is why many experts are surprised that a dirty-bomb attack has not happened. He says that one Sunday morning a few years after the 9/11 attacks, he burned a bagel in his toaster and his smoke alarm went off. Wouldn’t the $800 million a year for air marshals be better spent on more TSA staffing to cut wait times? Last fall Ted Koppel, the former ABC News correspondent and Nightline anchor, published Lights Out, a short, alarming book that makes the case that the United States is unprepared for a cyberattack on its electric grid. First, by bringing proliferation to the international stage through the summits he has hosted, Obama improved on his predecessor’s prevention efforts—much as he has done by hunting down terrorist leaders abroad while hardening targets and tightening homeland-security management at home. months and years may be rounded to the nearest full value. These are the radiation metrics, originally published by the EPA in 1992, that first responders would use to determine what area, if any, had to be evacuated in the event of a radiological-contamination event. The airlines had lobbied the FAA for these and other accommodations to keep costs down and the security lines moving. Todd Owen, a Customs official, said that all 11 million containers arriving at U.S. seaports are “analyzed” and “screened.” What he meant was that all containers are subject to a data-based threat matrix. By then, of course, an aerosolized attack could have infected thousands of victims who would have long since dispersed. In general, studies that found a link between 9/11 toxins and specific diseases were based on tracking people who were exposed to see if they had higher rates of illness than the general population. In general, studies that found a link between 9/11 toxins and specific diseases were based on tracking people who were exposed to see if they had higher rates of …

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