Detection: Advances and Weirdness

Two stories on the detection of harmful agents. First, good news from the Deseret Morning News, on the steady advance of detection equipment. A scientist from BYU has created a small, lightweight chemical detector. The project is in the pre-production stage:

The Guardion-7 chemical detector is a 28-pound portable device that can detect, without false positives and with exact specificity, a wide range of chemicals in fewer than five minutes...

The machine can detect everything from nerve agents to flammable accelerants used by arsonists, most explosives, toxic chemicals, drugs of abuse and organic compounds.

Tests for detecting nerve agents were done at Dugway Proving Grounds near Tooele. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency approved the machine's performance last month.

And from the "Weirdness" file, this one, in which U.S. Border Patrol discovered a radioactive cat speeding along a Seattle-area interstate:

The incident involved a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was monitoring [Interstate 5] for potential transport of a radiological “dirty bomb,” said agency official Joe Giuliano.

“Vehicle goes by at 70 mph,” Giuliano said last week during a meet on San Juan Island. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope (in the passing car).”

The agent stopped and searched the car. “Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said.

The columnist who broke the cat story asks, "What else is the government watching? Is it all too much?"

That's a reasonable question, but not the one I'm focused on.

Even if you set aside from any questions about privacy, is random sniffing of roadways an effective way of detecting potential threats? Even the agent involved in the cat-detection scenario said that the chance of catching a terrorist was "a billion to one."

Is this the best way for border agents to spend their time and resources? (He asked rhetorically.)

GAO: Homeland Security Issues for Congressional Oversight

The GAO issued a report for the upcoming 110th Congress on issues that the GAO thinks will require Congressional attention. Not surprisingly, many issues deal with homeland security. They include:

Ensure the Effective Integration and Transformation of the Department of Homeland Security:

After its creation in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had to transform 22 agencies—several with major management challenges—into one department. ... The areas GAO identified as at risk include planning and priority setting; accountability and oversight; and a broad array of management, programmatic, and partnering challenges.

Enhance Information Sharing, Accelerate Transformation, and Improve Oversight Related to the Nation’s Intelligence Agencies:

Since September 11, 2001, the nation has made some progress in fixing a major vulnerability—intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ failure to “connect the dots” and share information on the terrorists. ... But progress has been slow in some key areas, including implementing the policies needed to govern information sharing. ... Without continued congressional oversight of these issues, the progress and results of the many requirements and initiatives will remain unclear.

Enhance Border Security and Enforcement of Existing Immigration Laws:

[S]uccessful implementation of these steps has often been hampered by inadequate planning and guidance, misaligned priorities and resources, and outdated information technology systems. Additional congressional oversight can help ensure that travel document, border security, and immigration enforcement initiatives are yielding improved national and economic security for our nation’s citizens.

Strengthen Efforts to Prevent the Proliferation of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons and Their Delivery Systems (Missiles):

Additional congressional oversight can help assess the effectiveness of these activities and how U.S. resources might be better planned and managed to achieve nonproliferation goals.

Ensure the Effectiveness and Coordination of U.S. International Counterterrorism Efforts:

[T]he Congress has an important role to play in overseeing the implementation of these [9/11 Commission] recommendations and in assessing the effectiveness and coordination of U.S. diplomatic, military, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts to combat terrorism abroad.

Ensure a Strategic and Integrated Approach to Prepare for, Respond to, Recover, and Rebuild from Catastrophic Events. (Notably, the GAO emphasizes risk management as a guiding principle for dealing with catastrophic events):

Recent events—notably Hurricane Katrina and the threat of an influenza pandemic—have illustrated the importance of ensuring a strategic and integrated approach to catastrophic disaster management. ... Managing risk is also a key component of GAO’s model for managing risk provides a tool to assist the Congress, Department of Homeland Security, and other key players in preparing for and responding to such events.

Key Topics Needing Congressional Oversight

• Ensure that leadership, roles, responsibilities, and authorities are clear, well communicated, and understood and the capacity of the nation to prepare for, respond to, and recover/rebuild from catastrophic events is effectively assessed and exercised.
• Determine the extent to which relevant federal and state organizations consider risk-based factors when making management and resource decisions relating to catastrophic events.
• Identify and track the types and amount of federal assistance provided for addressing catastrophic events and develop metrics to inform congressional oversight.
• Examine the availability of private insurance for catastrophes and identify ways that the National Flood Insurance Program can improve the sufficiency of its financial resources and funding mechanism, mitigate repetitive losses, increase compliance with mandatory purchase requirements, and expedite the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood map modernization efforts.

A lot of these issues seriously affect state and local homeland security. It will be interesting to see how new leadership in Congress tackles these issues, and what differences emerge from the approaches taken since 9/11.

Local Police and Immigration Enforcement

A commentary in JURIST argues that local police should not be required to enforce immigration laws, because it would undermine efforts to share information and gather intelligence from immigrant communities. This information can be vital to locating potential homegrown threats:

Most police have realized that they must have the help and support of the communities they serve in order to do a good job of assuring public safety. This means that police must create and maintain relationships with the communities they serve – relationships based on trust. Without this kind of relationship, police will receive little in the way of intelligence and information from the public, making it harder for officers to do their always-difficult jobs.

Police officers understand that if they are forced to become adjunct immigration agents, people in immigrant communities will begin to fear talking to them because doing so might bring with it the potential for deportation ... The fear will cause immigrant communities to cut themselves off from police, not offering information about criminal activity and not reporting crime.

[P]ushing police into immigration enforcement will prove a substantial setback to every effort now underway to obtain crucial intelligence against potential terrorists on our own soil ... In any number of successful anti-terrorism cases in the U.S. – in Lackawanna, N. Y., and Toledo, Ohio, to take just two examples – crucial intelligence has almost always come from people in the Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Arab communities.

I find this a compelling argument. There are other ways to stem the tide of illegal immigration. The costs of chilling the relationship between local police and immigrant communities seem too great. Local police are in a unique position to develop a trusting relationship with immigrant communities and get information about potential threats before they emerge. No one else can do the job as well.

Lawmakers Want Info Sharing at Borders

Key lawmakers want more information sharing at the nation's borders, GovExec reports:

Senior members of the House Homeland Security Committee are calling for more information sharing among federal, state and local law enforcers in order to improve border security.

Committee ranking Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi on Wednesday asked the Government Accountability Office to review how information sharing is working among the federal government and law enforcers in border communities.

"The development of border intelligence based on information sharing among the state, local and tribal stakeholders from states along the borders would be a valuable tool to ensure resource allocation decisions are made based on a sound understanding of the risks posed," Thompson wrote to GAO.

This sounds good, but it begs the question: Why are we still making proposals to share information, more than five years after 9/11?