[HedgeYourBets]

Your reality is not our reality. If it were we would not show your degree of restraint. We would take something out of the Hiroshima bag, or, at the least, declare an undeclared Martial Law. But that's neither here nore there. What's relevant is that absent any meaningful event, this constant panic-stimulation does nothing to improve alertness. It's just ennervating and distracting. Are we going to be on "Orange Plus" for the next 79 years? OR are we just going to let domestic security agencies get on with doing their jobs quietly in the backgorund where they do the best job?

[Drugmachine]

I agree. Maybe the Administration should mothball The Homeland Security Agency along with the State Dept and put the funds into another tax break for the rich.

That depends on whether you think it's a useful endevor or not. I tend to look at the DHS in terms of any large synthetic bureaucracy. It exists for a lot of reasons that are not obvious nor do they have to do with the job at hand. The DHS was created as a crisis management response to a discrete series of events. It didn't really create anything new. What it did was reorganize most of the other branches and services in the government and subsumed a lot of them into an uber-agency.

Now there are many reasons to do this: control, authority, accountability, budget efficiency, turf, and a few more I can't think of. Then what you have is a very large very unwieldy organization that starts to look like a hostile takeover not of 1 company but of 34 companies. In other words DHS was formed out of 9-11 and because there was not an extra 30 billion dollars laying around they simply took monies from all those other agencies and branches and slapped together something which if you look at it rationally shouldn't and probably doesn't operate all that well. They're not using more/better/different tools to look at different information. They're using the same people, processes and tools to look at the same information. How does anyone know what's a worthy candidate for information? And then it gets channeled to a new top level management who puts whatever spin they need on it. This is indicative of an extremely fragile organization which could be very prone to inward-looking groupthink.

Before the DHS there was no forum for any alert in any service branch to bubble out to the public and that was probably frowned upon anyway as a matter of internal policy. Now that we have a DHS we have an 'information portal' as it were but the problem is that it communicates in what we used to call context-free or dimensionless variables. We are told "Something is bad" and there is no way to evaluate that in context or understand what "Orange" really means. Maybe it's bad, maybe it's just interesting, maybe we don't know if they know what they're talking about. The very nature of this makes that impossible to know or evaluate. Is today's Orange worse than last week's Orange? Should I look out for swarthy fellows? What constitutes 'suspicious' activities. Well I can tell you that John Ashcroft would say that not looking for suspicious people is itself a suspicious activity.

And at the end of this now we conclude that the very intelligence agencies which are responsible to the DHS for funneling it raw and processed information need to be aligned the same way and they need to be reorganized under an similar uber-agency. That because seemingly the output of these agencies is flawed, politicized, missing, inept we're going to make a yet larger bureaucracy rearranging all those little pieces around so that they do basically the same job for different bosses.

My God no one reads Harvard B-School case studies, do they? This is a corporate strategic failure waiting to occur. The key to creating good information is letting responsible people develop it and not slamming all these disparate cultures together in the hope that magically they will cross fertilize each other. The key to determining which chunks of information are accurate, important, worthy and actionable is to analyze them together but to get several different isolated groups to do it at the same time. Then and only then can someone evaluate the results and determine a real course of action. And if there is a real course of action, something concrete only then should they bother with telling the public anything. An alert from DHS should be a special event that people pay attention to. Not something on the crawl at the bottom of the newschannel screen. It should be rare, significant but importantly it should suggest something real that people can do or respond to.

[Paul Bunyan]

Unfortunately that's a man bites dog story compared to the 10 million false alarms and petty tyrannical aggrevations we have subjected ourselves to. And what that breeds is resentment and an outright indifference to everyone's shared responsibility.

[Paul Bunyan]

Yet the brief panic attacks last week about some terrorist attack on the Prudential bldg in Newark or Citicorp ctr on 53rd & Lex in NYC were based on information that was 3 years old. And with ust a month before Republican convention in NYC it seems fortuitous to bang the homeland defence drum. It's like when Tom Ridge says something like "We have unspecific but unimpeachable information that someone is planning something in an unknown place this summer. We are boosting the threat color to stain-yer-shorts-brown."

[brraverishhh]

No doubt that's true. For example the UK has arrested and detained about 500 people so far suspected of terrorist activities. I don't have any insight into the UK's national security laws or what they do with those detainees.

But it's very difficult to swallow everything the US DHS has been serving up as credible responsible information that has any bearing on anything. It's unwieldy and not all that useful. "More threats but still Orange." "Unconfirmed but reliable information." Let's face it any idiot could imagine that attacking NYC again in September would be something these terrorists have thought about; it's not a stretch. It's also not a stretch to guess that after these years the biggest targets are the softest: commercial real estate. But I have spent some considerable time down on Wall St. since 9-11 and there is a lot of stagecraft going on. The level of protection there is absurdly high and is meant to put a mean face on the body of counterterrorism. It's pretty dull to think that these smart well funded patient motivated reasonably well organized terrorists haven't torn that page out of their playbook already.

[HedgeYourBets]

Here's the original report of what happened at the GW Bridge:

Suspicious activity may have been ignored

HARTFORD -- A man from Vernon was recently driving through New York when he saw something suspicious but when he called police to alert them he says no one seemed to care.

A few days ago, Mike Maney was on his weekly trip from Vernon to Northern New Jersey to pick up merchandise. He was waiting in traffic at the approach to the George Washington Bridge when he noticed three men in the car next to him with a camera.

"I came across a vehicle sitting across from us in traffic, with three middle eastern looking men in it, with a very small palm video camera," said Maney, "We sat across from them for a minimum of 20 minutes and the entire time they were filming structures of the tunnels and the bridge."

Once the men spotted Maney watching, they appeared to become suspicious of him.

"The first time they saw me he instantly put the camera down in his lap and rolled the window up," he said." And every time he got a car length in front of me the camera came back out and he went back to filming."

Maney says he dialed 911 from his cell and he expected a big response.

"We figured the bridge would be shut down with the information I gave them," he said.

Maney says he gave dispatchers a description of the vehicle and a license plate number, but the calls made little progress because no one was sure who was supposed to respond.

"The woman on the other line who was a sergeant said 'well we're just not sure that was our jurisdiction,' which really disgusted me," he said.

Maney followed the car across the bridge into New Jersey and eventually onto the Jersey Turnpike where it disappeared, without ever being stopped by a police officer.

"I was on the phone with 911, gave them a description of the vehicle, make, model, license plate number, what they were wearing, what the camera looked like, I mean literally sitting next to them in bumper to bumper traffic," he said. "We were in New York, on the bridge and going all the way to New Jersey to the New Jersey turnpike where we turned off."

A spokesman for the New York State Police says the bridge is not in their jurisdiction and that the call would have been turned over to Port Authority police officers, who typically should have responded.

Mike Maney says he is sure a mistake was made.

"The first person who took my phone call should have taken it seriously, have somebody respond, pull the people over and see whether it was legit," he said.

Eyewitness News called the Port Authority police, the FBI in New Haven, New York and Washington, and the Department of Homeland Security but none of the agencies have returned the calls.

[Slonopotam845]

As we’ve all heard many times when considering these matters, if an attack occurs without warning, everyone will then be bitching about getting no warning. Taking potshots in such a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” context is all too easy.

What they should be doing is taking a page from the operational modes in countries like Columbia, the Philippines or Israel that confront this kind of thing regularly. There is no way that any country will ever be 100% successful. Eventually someone smart enough, organized enough and motivated enough will hurt us. So there is not much to be gained by hypersensitizing everyone to an urgent threat. It's basic human biology that no one can be stimulated and aroused forever. Eventually we burn out. So it's probably a wiser course of action to accept or internalize a given amount of risk and proceed from that point. Alerts are fine if they help.

Also, what's patently clear is that the DHS can't or won't distinguish from varying degrees in the level of terrorism. They appear to be constantly on the alert for a massive 9-11 style of attack while neglecting the possibility of run of the mill bus bombings, and similar low tech threats. Yesterday 2 men in Albant were arrested for conspiring to acquire a shoulder fired missile to take out a Pakistani official. Good work, now, did they forget the people building a rudimentary car bomb? Terrorism doesn't have to kill diplomats to be effective. It just has to occur.

[brraverishhh]

Brendan O'Neill on the terror alerts and their backlash.

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA643.htm