Bureaucracy and anti-terrorism

It’s almost seven years since 9/11 and the United States continues to spend colossal sums on inept security measures at home.

A bipartisan group of senators asked the GAO (the former General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office, an independent agency whose boss the president can appoint but not fire) to investigate reports of problems with the Federal Protection Service, whose 25,000 personnel (employees and contract guards, mostly the latter) are charged with protecting the 1 million people who spend each workday at 9,000 federal buildings across the nation. Hawaii’s Sen. Daniel Akaka was one of the senators requesting this probe.

The GAO investigators found that the FPS has cut costs at the expense of staffing, overtime, promotion and hiring. At many federal buildings, security cameras, x-ray machines and other scanning equipment are left unbroken for months, sometimes for years. At one building, fewer than 10% of security cameras worked. Akaka said the agency has actually gone downhill since it was folded into the then-new Department of Homeland Security.

Perhaps because leaders of the two major political parties spent a lot of time fighting over civil liberties issues when DHS was being conceived — not to mention making sure their home districts got some resources — there was never much public discourse on whether the ideas being proposed would actually work. So far, homeland security has created a lot of jobs, and I guess Wackenhut and Securitas are doing well corporately, but the GAO report is the latest evidence that someone isn’t taking the mission too seriously.

The Department of Homeland Security was built on a false premise from the get-go — that we didn’t have enough resources and enough legal authority to prevent the World Trade Center bombing. The truth is that we did. We actually knew about the bombing in advance. We didn’t know we knew. Intercepts, received in time to take action, weren’t translated until the day after the bombing. An FBI intelligence report that should have triggered alerts at major airports got lost in the bureaucracy.

The correct solution was to fire some managers at the FBI, recruit more Arabic translators, and covertly hand the CIA some funds to expand whatever unit it has fending off this sort of thing from abroad.

Instead we spent billions creating even more bureaucracy, more than we could continue funding, so that costs had to be cut at the expense of basic security. The government also sought more power to infringe on your privacy, despite the fact that America already had a classified court with a judge who could order almost any invasion of privacy imaginable without you ever knowing. (Details in “The Puzzle Palace,” an excellent book on the NSA, an even bigger intelligence agency than the CIA that most people never heard of, which suits them fine.)

Being a reporter, I tend to be a hardliner on the First Amendment, because I see more frequently than you do how officials of all political stripes routinely maneuver to keep truthful information from reaching you. But even if you’re one of those people who thinks only bad people’s privacy will be invaded, it’s worth asking why our compromises and our money have mostly bought more bureaucracy.