Ten years later and lawmakers still need the Congressional Research Service to help them define “homeland security.”
Posts tagged Homeland Security
By now, travelers are all too familiar with the Department of Homeland Security’s most visible advertising campaign. If you see something suspicious, instruct the billboards and public service announcements, say something to authorities.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made her “See Something, Say Something” campaign a top priority and rarely misses an opportunity to remind citizens about the importance of reporting any questionable behavior that could be linked to terrorism.
But when survey respondents were asked why they still might hesitate to report suspicious activity, 43 percent said they were worried about getting innocent people in trouble. Some of the respondents were uncomfortable judging their fellow citizens, while others worried that ringing up the police could turn out to be a waste of resources. A portion mistrusted law enforcement to begin with.
The findings lay bare a critical question at the core of Napolitano’s initiative: How can anyone be truly certain that his or her neighbor is suspicious enough to notify the government?
Read the rest of my story this week here. It’s a follow-up to our reporting last year with National Public Radio on domestic intelligence and the war on terror.
At the Center for Investigative Reporting, we obtained 14,000 rows of data describing surplus military equipment given to police in California since the 1990s. Read our story and search the data in an interactive viz.
“The way the FBI conducts their operations, it is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed.”
Ex-FBI informant Craig Montheilh speaking to the Guardian UK about his past role in terrorism investigations. Muslims in Orange County, Calif., were so unsettled by his violent talk of jihad that they ironically reported him to the FBI and sought a restraining order against him.
A key quote on the possible future domestic use of drones emerged today during testimony given by General Charles Jacoby of the North American Aerospace Defense Command to the House Armed Services Committee. While being pressed by Democrat Hank Johnson of Georgia to answer questions about the issue, Jacoby offered up this statement:
We would provide defense support to another civil authority or a lead federal agency upon request.
“Information sharing” became the most popular and oft-used phrase after Sept. 11 to describe the need for authorities to better-swap tips about possible terrorist threats. But each time the government creates a new database and signs up law-enforcement users in droves to search it, a new privacy vulnerability exists for everyday Americans. Just ask this Minnesota woman who happened to be born attractive and had her driver’s license record searched 425 times by 104 officers at 18 different agencies. Surely this is not what the 9/11 Commission meant by improved information sharing.
Source citypages.com
My story today on the nation’s terrorist no-fly list …
The federal appeals court ruling last week on gay marriage in California overshadowed other potentially big news in the legal community. A quieter decision Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has enabled Stanford University Ph.D. graduate Rahinah Ibrahim to clear another hurdle in her now years-long battle over the nation’s no-fly list, conceived to stop suspected terrorists from boarding airplanes.
The three-member panel ruled 2-1 that Ibrahim could continue to challenge [PDF] her 2005 detention at San Francisco International Airport, where police placed her in a holding cell for two hours. The ordeal eventually led to her being barred from re-entering the United States, a prohibition that continues today.
She’d arrived at the airport on Jan. 2, 2005, with her daughter and needed wheelchair assistance due to complications from a hysterectomy. The two were headed for Malaysia, where Ibrahim intended to present her doctoral research at a conference sponsored by Stanford. Instead, officers from the San Francisco Police Department placed her in handcuffs and gave no reason for why she was being held. The government generally does not disclose if or why an individual is on one of its many watch lists.
Radars, satellites and special monitoring devices all can’t tell the federal government as much about the scope of a disaster as the Waffle House restaurant chain, legendary in the Midwest and South. If you’ve never heard of the Waffle House, it’s kind of a slightly less-classy version of IHOP, at the risk of offending Waffle House regulars. (I’m not exactly a Waffle House regular, but I did grow up in Oklahoma and know all about them.)
FEMA honcho Craig Fugate said at a conference last week in New Orleans that no matter how bad a disaster is, Waffle House locations are among the first to re-open, and if they don’t, he knows conditions are truly worrisome. Over 100 of the chain’s locations were battered by Hurricane Katrina, says Emergency Management magazine. So they reacted swiftly by opening a command center and using gas grills to cook food and boil water in areas where the power had otherwise been knocked out:
Waffle House CEO Walt Ehmer described how recovery is ingrained in the company. He said the culture of the company revolves around two words: Show up. Getting restaurants open as quickly as possible following an emergency not only gives Waffle House the competitive advantage, but it also allows employees to return to work and provides a sense of normalcy for residents who may not have had a hot meal in days.
“If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’”
Mark Wahlberg to Men’s Journal on what would have happened were he onboard one of the 9/11 flights. Wonder if his publicist is in overdrive about now. Is he saying those who perished weren’t as tough and brave as him?
Source The Huffington Post
