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HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE (CONT’D:)

Lee Cooper of Solomons had done the smart thing and signed up for e-alerts about flight delays. So, thanks to a United Airlines e-mail, he knew that his 7:25 p.m. flight from Knoxville to Dulles was delayed until 9:40 because of air traffic control backups. That should have saved him more than two hours of waiting around at the airport. He did two more smart things: He printed his boarding pass and went to http://www.tsa.gov to check the average wait times at security checkpoints between 8 and 9 p.m.

His diligence, however, was unraveled by the Transportation Security Administration, which closed the security checkpoints at 7:30 p.m.

The result? Cooper ended up on the wrong side of security and had to wait until the next day to depart.

Jeez.

I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS THAT HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE, but this isn’t funny: “Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) familiar with the situation say the mix-ups, in which marshals are mistaken for terrorism suspects who share the same names, have gone on for years — just as they have for thousands of members of the traveling public.”

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE. So why are they wasting time on this? While this goes unpunished.

JOE BIDEN’S RAVING LUNACY — (and Orrin Hatch’s) and why it means homeland security is a joke. My FoxNews column for tomorrow is up.

HOMELAND SECURITY REMAINS A JOKE: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has incorrectly kept nearly 24,000 people on a terrorist watch list on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information, while missing people with genuine ties to terrorism who should have been on the list, according to a Justice Department report released Wednesday.”

HOMELAND SECURITY REMAINS A JOKE: Seizing Laptops and Cameras Without Cause. Just not a very funny one. As I’ve said for the past six years, I don’t understand why the Democrats haven’t made a bigger deal about this kind of thing.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A (SOMETIMES CRUEL) JOKE — and Tom Maguire notes that it’s been that way since before Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias started to pay attention.

I actually remember something like that happening to an English graduate student and his family who lived across the street from us at Holden Green when I was a kid.

Plus, this crucial distinction: “In fascism, you’re persecuted because of who you are and who your parents were. In an American airport, you’re persecuted because you’re there.”

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Homeland security remains a joke. Just not a very funny one. More criticism here.

HOMELAND SECURITY, STILL A JOKE: “A Mexican national infected with a highly contagious form of tuberculosis crossed the U.S. border 76 times and took multiple domestic flights in the last year, according to Customs and Border Protection interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Times. The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency was warned by health officials on April 16 that the frequent traveler was infected, but it took the Homeland Security officials more than six weeks to issue a May 31 alert to warn its own border inspectors, according to Homeland Security sources who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Homeland Security took one more week to tell its own Transportation Security Agency.”

I remain surprised that the Democrats haven’t made more of an issue out of Homeland Security incompetence.

HOMELAND SECURITY: Still a joke.

HOMELAND SECURITY — STILL A JOKE: “Undercover Congressional investigators set up a bogus company and obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March that would have allowed them to buy the radioactive materials needed for a so-called dirty bomb.”

HOMELAND SECURITY REMAINS A JOKE: That’s not funny, but the fake boarding pass saga is. Sort of.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS STILL A JOKE, and Jonathan Rauch writes on how the government let down its guard by passing on an innovative security approach:

Hiring people to stand guard full-time over all but the most sensitive sites would be prohibitively costly and cumbersome. Walker’s solution was what he calls distributed surveillance. HomeGuard posts webcams on the peripheries of no-go zones around critical sites. Cameras, of course, are old hat. Here is the innovation: Regular people, not high-priced security professionals, monitor the sites over the Internet. If a camera detects motion, it transmits a picture to several “spotters,” ordinary Web users who earn $10 an hour for simply looking at photos online and answering this question: “Do you see a person or vehicle in this image?” A yes answer triggers a security response.

The details are ingenious, and you can read about them in my 2003 column on HomeGuard. Suffice to say that, in principle, the system is cheap and almost infinitely scalable. In practice, however, the system needed field-testing before private industry could consider it. Having built a prototype, Walker Digital approached the government in the spring of 2003.

On the recommendation of Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., Walker and his staff met with a series of officials, first at the White House and then at DHS, where they spoke with people from then-Secretary Tom Ridge on down. They were not selling anything. “We were very clear we would give it to a contractor in a heartbeat,” Walker says. “We were reluctant to build a field trial. It’s not our thing. We’re systems designers.” Having designed the system, they were trying to give it away.

It didn’t happen, though. Too bad, as it seems like a real Army of Davids approach.

HOMELAND SECURITY REMAINS A JOKE:

WHILE most of the Bush administration has been fighting against increased unionization of security-related positions since 9/11, the federal Transportation Security Administration is headed the other way. In a small case with national implications, TSA doesn’t just break with the Bush administration position; it reverses its own stated policy. . . .

What’s going on? Well, some in Congress would like to see those private firms take over from TSA at more airports. The agency seems to be out to hamstring its competition. . . . Unionization could easily chew up the private security companies’ already thin profit margins — thus locking in TSA’s near-monopoly control.

It’s all about pork. My impression of TSA screening at airports is that it’s not any better than things were before, nor is it any faster or better organized. Certainly on this last trip, the security — and the immigration — folks at the Atlanta airport seemed poorly organized and inefficient. I nearly missed my flight because people who were supposed to be organizing the lines were standing around talking instead.

My predictions about the whole Homeland Security enterprise seem to have been borne out, alas.

THE ANSWER IS: “Because homeland security is still a joke.”

The question:

At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?

With apologies to the Amazing Karnak.

A PACK NOT A HERD: Homeland Security remains a joke, but alert airline passengers noticed a felon sneaking on board a plane at LAX:

Airport cameras captured it all: On a busy morning at Los Angeles International Airport last month, a convicted felon wearing a sweatshirt, sunglasses and gloves strolled unnoticed past two security checkpoints in Terminal 5 and walked onto a jumbo jet without a ticket.

Kareem Thomas, a 19-year-old Decatur, Ga., resident on probation for burglary, was discovered hiding in an airplane restroom by passengers and was apprehended by police before takeoff.

(Emphasis added.) One of our faculty candidates was on that flight, and told us the story — I was surprised that it didn’t get any attention at the time. He said that a passenger noticed the guy walk right past the ticket-taker and onto the plane, and followed him to see him sneak into the rest room.

Your (rather large number of) tax dollars at work. Maybe we should have pushed harder on that Impeach Norm Mineta campaign. Because, so far, the people who are paying for their seats seem to be the main source of airline security, not the people we’re paying to protect us.

HOMELAND SECURITY: STILL A JOKE:

Laura Callahan, the deputy CIO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was placed on paid administrative leave last week after questions surfaced about her academic qualifications, a DHS spokeswoman confirmed.

The move came after members of Congress contacted department officials demanding answers to questions about her academic background, as well as about the department’s policy on background checks.

On her resume, Callahan, who was appointed to the position on April 1, said she received her academic degrees, including a doctorate in computer information systems, from Hamilton University in Evanston, Wyo.

However, the congressmen, including Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), contend that according to published reports, Hamilton isn’t licensed by that state, nor is the school accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. The congressmen said Hamilton is a “diploma mill.”

Of course, the real question is why she got the job in the first place. Don’t they do background checks? And besides, there’s this:

In March 2000, she was one of two White House officials accused of threatening Northrop Grumman Corp. workers with jail unless they kept quiet about the disappearance of thousands of White House e-mails, according to press reports at the time. Callahan was the White House webmaster under the Clinton administration, and Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman ran the White House computer system at the time.

Maybe they figured that was proof she could keep a secret. . . .

(Via Robi Sen).

UPDATE: Background checks? Hah! Lawrence Haws says that he only needed three minutes with google to discover this “explosive” secret. He’s even got photographic evidence!

Perhaps someone should introduce the Homeland Security folks to Google.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Haws has noticed changes to one of the profiles he found. He suspects Callahan, but a reader emailed me to note that anyone can edit that profile rather easily.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, this joke’s on us. Not the phony degree part, but the site that Haws found. Reader elaborates:

Microsoft SQL ships with a demo data base called northwind traders. By default it is installed. It gives a basic idea of table relationships and the data that might be in a live DB. It’s pretty lame actually. It just so happens that there is a Laura Callahan listed as an employee. . . .

Basically, someone wrote a quick table editor for a test and left it visible to the web. I’m a long term DBA who’s been worked with just about every DB platform that’s shipped since 1995. Easy to get fooled by if you’re not familiar with the software. The first clue should have been that the data was editable by anyone on the web. The second clue was the simple (ugly) interface. The third clue should have been the products on the site had nothing to do with parent site.

I won’t box you around much because you were just passing along someone else’s error, but I read your site. And after all, according to some you’re one the 4 most powerful bloggers! ;)

Hmm. Well, if an “ugly” interface is a clue that something’s wrong then there’s a lot of funny business going on. It’s odd that the pictures match, though. But there you are — I don’t promise no mistakes here, just swift corrections.

I WOULD FILE THIS STORY under the usual “homeland security is still a joke” heading, but, really, I think it belongs under an “immigration policy is still a joke.” Or maybe it’s some of both. As Matt Welch puts it:

This regulation and a host of others like it were in place long before Congressional fries were liberated from the Vichy regime; what’s new is the enforcement. Since late last fall, when the Department of Homeland Security installed a comprehensive immigration database (the jauntily named Consular Lookout and Support System, or CLASS), yesterday’s minor visa transgression is today’s “no-entry” stamp.

Apparently it’s even possible that if journalists come to the United States as tourists and then write something about it, they may be barred entry in the future on the ground that they’ve violated the visa rules. That’s just wrong.

HOMELAND SECURITY: It’s still a joke.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS STILL A JOKE:

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico — There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world’s most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.

I should know. On Saturday morning, I slipped into and out of a top-secret area of the lab while guards sat, unaware, less than a hundred yards away.

Not quite as James Bondian as it might sound, but bad enough. Noah Shachtman, who wrote the story, has more on his blog, DefenseTech.