New Year’s Resolutions

[babylonsister]

-Ed Columnist
New Year’s Resolutions


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03dowd.html?hp

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 2, 2010


Janet Napolitano and I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Eve together.

But there we were on this soggy Thursday, sitting in her office on the outskirts of the city, beside a big, black leather saddle that was a gift from the governor of Sonora, Mexico, when Napolitano was governor of Arizona.

snip///

She said criticism that her department had been on auto-pilot before the sky scare was “misguided.”

Asked if her job is particularly thankless, given that only mistakes are recognized, she smilingly made a “don’t feel sorry for me” gesture, rubbing imaginary tears away from her eyes.

I noted that Dick Cheney had gone squirrelly seeing the avalanche of daily threats coming in, and asked how she kept paranoia at bay.

“There’s a lot of it out there,” she said. “I try to keep focused, really trying to ascertain who needs to be our targets.”

Why is it so hard for those charged with keeping us safe to be as imaginative and innovative as filmmakers like James Cameron? “We do have some great technology, but this is not a movie,” she said. “The reality is much more complex and nuanced, and you can’t take human judgment out of it.”

She said that “one of the things that may come out of this awful day is perhaps a renewed sense of urgency,” and that it has spurred her department to “accelerate” talks it was already having about collaborating with the Department of Energy — “which has a phenomenal research budget and capacity.”

She laughed when I wondered if she wished she’d lobbied harder for that Supreme Court spot.

Does anything keep her up at night? Her voice got lower and more serious. “This one has,” she said, “because I want to know how this individual got on this plane with this material. I want to know so we can figure out what we should be doing to defeat that.”

As I left, I asked the secretary if she’d had to cancel her New Year’s Eve plans.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

“I guess you’re not going to tell me what they were,” I wondered.

“No,” she replied, her brown eyes twinkling. Just another classified matter at the Department of Homeland Security.

[lapfog_1]

1. Sadly, she is falling into the trap of thinking that this is a "technology issue"

by the remark about the DOE labs. Yes, they can invent some great stuff, but the terrorists will always find a way around the technology. It has been the nature of war for all of human history. Build a stone castle and your opponent invents a better canon, put on a suit of armor and your opponent will get a crossbow with a armor piercing tip...

We need to do three things.

1. Figure out what motivates the terrorist and see if we can eliminate their motivation (not always possible, but worth a try).

2. Intelligence gathering and information dissemination to the front lines of our defense (in this case, the airport security people).

3. Question all passengers (without regard to race or religion) and profile certain passenger behaviors. Someone with a background in psychology needs to talk to each and every passenger.

This would be far better and less expensive (and, ultimately, more secure) than more technology.

Oh, and one last thing, accept that we are going to have terrorist attacks in the future, that someone, somewhere, will always be pissed off with us enough to do it, and our intelligence services will miss it, and our technology will fail... and we simply live with it. Because giving up our freedom in exchange for a false since of security isn't worth it.

[vadawg]

2. lol its easy to be imaginative when you can control exactly what the ending is going to be

the most imaginative and out of the box thinkers you will ever find are the tips of the spear in any org, whether thats the military, LEO or business. I guess if we have lil smurf guys blowing up planes then cameron is our man....

[Name removed]

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