Adfero Group HSPI

From my time in government at NASA and DHS, there was an adage I remember: “Don’t put anything in an e-mail or in writing that you are not prepared to defend if it ends up in the Washington Post.” That was healthy advice that I’m sure members of the Napolitano team got when they entered the Nebraska Avenue Complex. But they seem to have forgotten those words and found congressional trouble over FOIA requests.

New footage from March 2, 2011, shows seven drug mules likely carrying about $50,000 worth of marijuana each. The trail where the motion-sensor hidden cameras were placed is 80 miles north of the border, due north of the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, which has seen a marked increase in drug mule traffic since the creation of two “apprehension” zones on either side of the reservation’s boundaries.

I recently joined the board of directors for The Constitution Project, a think tank that provides scholarship and bipartisan policy recommendations on constitutional issues in the criminal justice and rule of law arenas. Maintaining an effective criminal justice system and upholding the Constitution requires a collective effort from throughout the public and private sectors, and the Constitution Project supports this.

Around a year ago, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano made a public pledge that DHS would be hire 1,000 or so cybersecurity experts over the next three years. That DHS fell well short of that target number is no surprise. Besides trying to attract some of the smartest, technically versed and potentially highest paid workers out there, the secretary is saddled with a personnel system that even Kim Jong Il of North Korea would reject as a problematic disaster. If the system continues to fail as it is now, the secretary should raise holy hell to make the machinery move faster.

By Doug Doan
The FDA has decided to start monitoring the radiation levels of Japanse Exports. No doubt the announcement was carefully constructed to make Americans feel better about the food they eat, while simultaneously reminding everyone that the FDA is on the job of food safety. It might just work too. Most Americans, have absolutely no idea how products are screening at our various Ports of Entry before they enter the United States. But for anyone that has been around a bit, the FDA announcement can only be viewed with intense skepticism.

Last week, as the world was focused on the crisis in Japan and the military action in Libya, the Associated Press reported on the use of Predator UAVs to help Mexican authorities in their war on drug cartels. Yet, at a conference at MIT’s Lincoln Labs on Homeland Security technology, I learned that the Predator was ineffective for wide-area surveillance during the Deep Water Horizon disaster. It was scrapped after less than two weeks. Congress should look closely at the cost/benefit of UAVs and how their use in Mexico deviates from the DHS mission.

The notion of “resilience” is a core principle in the United States National Security Strategy, yet in practice, the term lacks clarity. Other societies with years of terrorism experience have become more resilient to the risk of terror attacks. Is there a best practice to be implemented here? What is resilience and is community resilience to terrorism achievable? Resilience should become a national priority instead of a soundbite.

Seizing on the spirit of change spreading around the globe, the U.S. Travel Association recently issued its recommendations for overhauling the security screening experience for passengers in a report titled “A Better Way.” Improvements to our aviation security need few new ideas. Rather, as the report implies, wholesale change requires intrepid leadership.

Last week, I wrote about the two main tribes that face off against each other when we discuss or try to do cybersecurity. These are the Wooly Headed Wonks and the Propeller Headed Geeks. But if the Wonks are mainly lawyers and political science/international relations types, there is a sub-tribe of behavioral social scientists. America and her allies have the people to deal with the challenges of cybersecurity; we simply need to get them all in harness and pulling together.

An industry group released a report advocating for major changes in how the federal government tackles its aviation security mission. In addition to 14 primary recommendations is a broader theme that the political climate in which DHS and TSA operate needs to change. aFormer DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, former Democratic Congressman Jim Turner, and Sabre Holdings CEO Sam Gililland served as co-chairs of a panel of external experts advising the U.S. Travel Association on the report, which I helped research and develop over the past year.

The TSA is still engaged in a game of intellectual Twister, bending every which way to meet an impossible congressional mandate that it enforce the screening of 100 percent of all cargo — domestic as well as international. The new suggested deadline shoots for all inbound cargo to be screened by December. God bless the TSA for continuing in its creative efforts to meet the mandate without undermining security, provoking allies and clogging commerce.

With each passing day of fighting in Libya, it is sadly becoming obvious that the international hopes of seeing long-time dictator Col. Moammar Qadhafi deposed from his more than four-decade rule are fading. President Obama has, from his first day in office, made clear that he has zero interest in taking any type of unilateral approach in regard to use of U.S. military forces. If the Libyan rebellion is crushed and Qadhafi exacts revenge upon the population, what will that mean for presidential debates in the 2012 election?

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Defense Media Network about Virginia Task Force 1, the International Search and Rescue Team from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. With Japan in great need after the 8.9 magnitude earthquake, Virginia Task Force 1 is already deployed in the Ofanuto area of Japan.

The vast expansion of mobile computing capabilities and usage has enormous benefits but down sides as well. Most folks fail to understand that their smart phones and tablets are every bit as much computers as their laptops, and they are just as vulnerable to attack and exploitation. The bad guys have always targeted what was easy or what was lucrative. PC’s are easy; smart phones are lucrative.

Peter King’s Homeland Security hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” convinced me to prepare this post about an initiative established in the DHS/ICE Special Agent in Charge office in New York City. From my perspective, the meetings were productive because they allowed ICE and Muslim communities to speak openly about initiatives, procedures and concerns about profiling.

Congressman John Mica used a recently updated GAO report to claim that TSA has “cooked the books” when it comes to comparing costs under the Screening Partnership Program. When Administrator Pistole is testifies before the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, members should ask Pistole some questions to clarify his decision on SPP.

The images coming out of quake-damaged Japan are truly indescribable. Incidents like the 8.9 earthquake and its follow-on tsunami give us all a reason to pause from our daily lives to wonder what would we do if something like that happened here. That’s just the question the people behind the National Level Exercise 2011 have been asking themselves for nearly a year, as they have been working to pull all of the pieces together for the full-scale drill on the nation’s preparedness that will take place this coming May.

How should law enforcement respond to “threats” against government officials, particularly when the “threats” do not rise to the level of criminal activity? Law enforcement has made great strides in collecting data on incidents and behaviors that are suspicious in nature. The advent of Fusion Centers and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI) has laid the framework. If we do not begin to look at the threats against our institutions by people who are aggrieved, violently inclined, or mentally ill, then we will likely see more of this kind of crime.

To understand the scope of the devastation wrought upon Japan, watch this terrifying first-person video of an individual caught in the middle of the Tsunami. Keep in mind that a Tsunami does not come crashing in, like the waves of a hurricane, but is a wall of water that just keeps coming. The video gets worse and worse as the minutes pass.

We’ve got anti-Muslim accusations. We’ve got anti-American accusations. We’ve got anti-Peter King accusations. We’ve got charges of bigotry, racism and religious intolerance. We’ve got a New York Times magazine writer asserting that “America is a tinderbox of prejudice and fear.” In short, we’ve got a lot of hysteria.