DHS to Focus on Providing Intelligence to Local Govs, Private Sector to Counter Domestic Threats

[The Straight Story]

DHS to Focus on Providing Intelligence to Local Governments, Private Sector to Counter Domestic Threats

Nearly a decade after Congress created the Department of Homeland Security to prevent other 9/11-style terrorist attacks, a bipartisan group of experts says it is time for the agency to shift its focus from foreign enemies to working with local governments and the private sector so it can secure the border and critical infrastructure from homegrown threats.

“The growth of our expectations of domestic security, and the evolution of threats away from traditional state actors toward non-state entities — drug cartels, organized crime, and terrorism are prominent examples — suggest that the DHS intelligence mission should be threat agnostic,” said a report by the Aspen Homeland Security Group, which is co-chaired by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

“Though the impetus for creating this new agency, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was clearly terrorism-based, the kinds of tools now deployed, from border security to cyber protection, are equally critical in fights against emerging adversaries,”‘ the report continued.

In prepared testimony to be given Wednesday afternoon to the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism, HUMINT, Analysis, and Counterintelligence, Chertoff and two other Aspen Group members — including Philip Mudd, a former FBI official who is now deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center — stressed the unique role of DHS. They noted that in a time of budget constraints, DHS must focus on its “core competency while the agency sheds intelligence functions less central” to its mission.

http://publicintelligence.net/dhs-to-focus-on-providing-intelligence-on-domestic-threats/

[PSPS]

1. Just drop the charade and rename it Stasi.

Only, in this case, it is run by the corporations and accountable to nobody. All you need to know is that these "recommendations" are coming from "Aspen Homeland Security Group," which is a private group of people whose financial livelihood depends on robbing the treasury and destroying anyone who opposes them.

[napoleon_in_rags]

2. That could be good or bad, depending on what "threat agnostic" really means.

If it means a reality based numeric assessments of threats which ranks the threat of many being killed by a bridge collapse(1) at the same level as a terrorist threat to the same bridge, than its good. If it means ranking the threat posed by companies dumping toxic pollutants into water supplies unwittingly at the same level as a terrorist attack causing the same amount of illness and death, it's good. If it just means more surveillance of domestic nobodies without needing any link to a serious foreign organization or threat, that's bad.

1)

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