The Homeland Security Policy Institute released an issue brief highlighting the value of applying analytic tradecraft techniques more widely throughout the homeland security community. Author and HSPI Senior Fellow Jon Nowick maintains that as the homeland security community faces evolving threats, it must tap every opportunity to use resources smartly.
US-VISIT gave its 8th annual briefing on Thursday, and the progress there continues to be impressive. While the advances in biometrics raise some delicate privacy questions, the United States is getting ever closer to creating a system in which it will be more or less impossible to lie one’s way into this country through the legal ports of entry. And more and more countries – sixty-one at last count – are going down the same road of using biometrics for border control.
Recently, it was reported that members of Mexican Crime Cartels illegally entered five different truck yards in northern Mexico by threatening security officers. These criminals did not steal cash or cargo. Instead, they compromised sensitive corporate information – routing information for U.S.-bound commercial truck shipments. Criminal organizations the world over, especially along the land border of Mexico and the United States, use commercial trucks to move contraband. Because of the huge amount of trade that crosses our borders and the limited number of personnel to inspect and process this trade, two methods were created to ease the cargo delays and help the CBP inspectors target suspect trucks.
Newsweek asked me to do a piece looking at the current state of the political debate over border security. The request turned out to be well-timed, because it coincided with the release of the latest annual figures on the number of apprehensions at the border, which remains the best measure we have of how many people are trying to enter the United States illegally.Is the border secure yet? If not, it’s getting awfully close. Yet the political debate remains focused almost entirely on further ramping up border enforcement.
Something interesting is going on in Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security. For the first two-plus years of the Obama administration, Secretary Napolitano’s priority was to plug security vulnerabilities, real or perceived. Arguments that her department was also responsible for encouraging trade and travel, and that security measures should therefore be carefully risk-targeted, were received with minimal enthusiasm. Recent DHS efforts, however, show a new paradigm in how the United States engages foreign partners, driven by the need to increase security while also promoting economic benefits.
It was recently reported that Congress is launching an investigation into the Drug Enforcement Administration, following claims that the agency helped drug cartels launder money – an operation some in Congress say bears striking resemblance to the failed “Fast and Furious” anti-gunrunning probe. While most of America is appalled at the “Fast and Furious” operation, myself included, money laundering investigations are a completely different, proven and accepted investigative technique when conducted properly.
The first question asked in the Republican Presidential debate last night was on the Patriot Act—and all the candidates got it wrong. The investigative authorities in the act were described as something extraordinary—something special for the needs of national security. That is just incorrect. It is stunning that a decade after 9/11 so much misinformation about the act still pervades the public debate.
I welcome you to join us on Thursday, November 10, 2011 from 2:00 – 3:00pm for an HSPI Policy and Research Forum event featuring John S. Pistole, Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Mr. Pistole will discuss risk-based, intelligence-driven counterterrorism efforts, and will highlight the layered security approach and advances of TSA technology over the last decade.
I just spent some time visiting the Homeland Security folks at the Laredo port of entry and ARNORTH in San Antonio. I walked away from both visits with the same conclusion – if we want to solve the problem of our broken borders and deeply flawed immigration enforcement, we have got to let go of the “security blanket” of arguing that we just have to get the border under control and everything will be fine. We are never going to secure the border by fixating on the border.
Sponsored by:
