DHS and TSA Leak Like an Old Rowboat
Associated Press reported on December 30 that the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is going after travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott. The two bloggers published details of a confidential TSA security directive or memo which was issued in the wake of the December 25th attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines passenger flight. Frischling and Elliott claim to have received the details of the security directive from an anonymous source.
According to Eileen Sullivan's Associated Press report, the directive was dated Dec. 25 and was issued after a 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged with attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam. The bomb, which allegedly was hidden in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear, malfunctioned and no one was killed. Authorities said the device included a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with powder that the FBI determined to be PETN, a common explosive.
The TSA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are in some important respects fractured organizations beset by intra-agency management power plays, and inter-agency communications difficulties. None of the problems are unusual in themselves — there isn't a big organization anywhere on the planet that doesn't suffer some of the same ills. The problem with these sorts of difficulties at TSA and DHS is that both agencies are responsible for people's lives. The horrible complexity imposed by inter-departmental communications — providing raw intelligence to various members and sub-agencies that can put it to use — amongst the dozens of players, security providers, investigators, intelligence organs and policing bodies over which DHS in particular is supposed to have jurisdiction, amounts to a mile high mountain that must be climbed every hour of every day. It's a hell of a lousy way to run a security and intelligence supervisory agency.
Information leaks out of government agencies like water from an open tap. It just keeps flowing and flowing. The most public thing the TSA seems to have done about this latest leak is to start pumping the bloggers for information.
The TSA and DHS are crippled by their own complexities. They and their sub-agencies need to redesign and re-implement their processes, procedures and poorly wrought inter-agency communications to create a truly cohesive and cooperatively efficient domestic security force. Fat chance. Sadly, it will likely happen only after so devastating a disaster takes place that even the most deeply entrenched, pork-barreling, party-loyal Senators, Congressional representatives and senior bureaucrats are finally heaved from office.
As always, the toughest decisions for national security are made only after the blood of citizens has been shed by some terrorizing monster bent on some insane mission. The problem which really creeps me out right now is that even in the long wake of 9/11, and after all the dead and wounded servicemen and servicewomen shipped home from Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years, the politicians and senior bureaucrats are still jealously protecting their state and district empires, agonizing more about re-election than their constituents, and carefully tending to their big corporate sponsors.
Canada has little more to offer; the UK less still. Canadians are struggling with an insular federal government which spends more time talking to itself than its taxpaying citizens. The specter of a police state edging into view in the UK rears its ugly head with each successive arrest of yet another group of Islamist plotters. The European Union seems to have been lured into a bureaucratic minefield of its own making, while hoping its citizens will kind of hold it all together, starting in surprise at the immigrant unrest and outright rioting in the poorest neighborhoods of the largest cities. Oh dear United States of America — rest assured you're not alone.
We're dying out here, and we're paying big taxes for the dubious honor of yet again being threatened by a terrorist who yet again has circumvented security at an airport. The overworked security staff at Pearson International Airport did, however, manage to snag a pair of fingernail clippers two weeks ago from my carry-on. Kept me waiting for ten minutes while they were (I presume) deciding whether or not I was a threat to national security. But Chemical Umar managed to board his Northwest flight just fine. The TSA and DHS should be beating up on themselves for being the cripplingly complex organizations they are today. They can't even keep their own data secure. If the TSA and DHS do their jobs better, they won't have to worry about innocent bloggers.
According to Eileen Sullivan's Associated Press report, the directive was dated Dec. 25 and was issued after a 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged with attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam. The bomb, which allegedly was hidden in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear, malfunctioned and no one was killed. Authorities said the device included a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with powder that the FBI determined to be PETN, a common explosive.
The TSA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are in some important respects fractured organizations beset by intra-agency management power plays, and inter-agency communications difficulties. None of the problems are unusual in themselves — there isn't a big organization anywhere on the planet that doesn't suffer some of the same ills. The problem with these sorts of difficulties at TSA and DHS is that both agencies are responsible for people's lives. The horrible complexity imposed by inter-departmental communications — providing raw intelligence to various members and sub-agencies that can put it to use — amongst the dozens of players, security providers, investigators, intelligence organs and policing bodies over which DHS in particular is supposed to have jurisdiction, amounts to a mile high mountain that must be climbed every hour of every day. It's a hell of a lousy way to run a security and intelligence supervisory agency.
Information leaks out of government agencies like water from an open tap. It just keeps flowing and flowing. The most public thing the TSA seems to have done about this latest leak is to start pumping the bloggers for information.
The TSA and DHS are crippled by their own complexities. They and their sub-agencies need to redesign and re-implement their processes, procedures and poorly wrought inter-agency communications to create a truly cohesive and cooperatively efficient domestic security force. Fat chance. Sadly, it will likely happen only after so devastating a disaster takes place that even the most deeply entrenched, pork-barreling, party-loyal Senators, Congressional representatives and senior bureaucrats are finally heaved from office.
As always, the toughest decisions for national security are made only after the blood of citizens has been shed by some terrorizing monster bent on some insane mission. The problem which really creeps me out right now is that even in the long wake of 9/11, and after all the dead and wounded servicemen and servicewomen shipped home from Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years, the politicians and senior bureaucrats are still jealously protecting their state and district empires, agonizing more about re-election than their constituents, and carefully tending to their big corporate sponsors.
Canada has little more to offer; the UK less still. Canadians are struggling with an insular federal government which spends more time talking to itself than its taxpaying citizens. The specter of a police state edging into view in the UK rears its ugly head with each successive arrest of yet another group of Islamist plotters. The European Union seems to have been lured into a bureaucratic minefield of its own making, while hoping its citizens will kind of hold it all together, starting in surprise at the immigrant unrest and outright rioting in the poorest neighborhoods of the largest cities. Oh dear United States of America — rest assured you're not alone.
We're dying out here, and we're paying big taxes for the dubious honor of yet again being threatened by a terrorist who yet again has circumvented security at an airport. The overworked security staff at Pearson International Airport did, however, manage to snag a pair of fingernail clippers two weeks ago from my carry-on. Kept me waiting for ten minutes while they were (I presume) deciding whether or not I was a threat to national security. But Chemical Umar managed to board his Northwest flight just fine. The TSA and DHS should be beating up on themselves for being the cripplingly complex organizations they are today. They can't even keep their own data secure. If the TSA and DHS do their jobs better, they won't have to worry about innocent bloggers.
Labels: airline security, airport security, December 25, DHS, leaked directive, TSA
posted by Howard Carson, Managing Editor @ 8:05 PM
