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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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MAY 25, 2004
How to Make America Safer Increased homeland security efforts are certainly helping. However, much more still needs to be done. Here's a checklist Want to know what's wrong with the homeland security effort? Take the executive order signed by President Bush last February that directs the Homeland Security Dept. to seize any vessel in U.S. waters if the boat "may be used, or is susceptible of being used, for voyage into Cuban waters." Aside from the order being a possible violation of the Bill of Rights, and the blatant election-year appeal for the anti-Castro, Cuban-American vote in South Florida, consider this: No boats have yet been seized under the order, yet the U.S. Coast Guard has had to draw up regulations and enlist cash-strapped local police departments and harbor patrols in the effort. Launching an armada against a few retired couples hoping for a weekend sail to Havana diverts law enforcement from catching polluters, drug smugglers, illegal aliens, and maybe a few real terrorists. Americans all may feel a little safer since September 11, thanks in part to stepped-up efforts by security and intelligence agencies. But unfortunately, the effort has been marred too often by misplaced priorities, poor execution, and a process sometimes controlled by politics rather than smart policy. Because no major terrorist incident has occurred in the U.S. since September 11, the sense of urgency has dissipated. That could be dangerous. Ask any terrorism expert in or out of government, and most will tell you that it's almost certain that enemies of America will launch another attack. So it's time for a checklist of what still must be done to make the country safer in an increasingly dangerous world. Here's how to address the key remaining problem areas: An immigration policy that distinguishes terrorists from legal aliens: No government agency was as conflicted as the former U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Service, now wisely separated into enforcement and citizenship-service branches, and placed within the Homeland Security Dept. (Remember when the INS issued post-mortem visa extensions to several of the September 11 attackers after their suicide missions?) Yet, Congress and the White House still can't agree on the magnitude of the threat posed by illegal immigration, or even if federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies ought to be coordinating their efforts to stop it. It may surprise you to learn that, even today, a green-card lottery system assigns 55,000 work permits each year to foreign nationals whose countries are underrepresented in the U.S. Recipients this year included 2,600 people from Sudan, Iran, and Syria -- countries identified by the State Dept. as sponsors of international terrorism. Even State acknowledges that the lottery program "can be taken advantage of by hostile intelligence officers or terrorists." That's hardly reassuring. As Homeland Security attempts to construct a so-called "virtual border" around the U.S., a new tracking system, U.S.-VISIT, already authenticates the identity of visitors holding visas through digital photos and finger scans. U.S. authorities can now determine whether these visitors are who they say they are. And ultimately, the system should be able to alert authorities when visitors have overstayed their visas. When combined with watchlists and other databases, police may obtain valuable tips on potential terrorists. Still, after decades of neglect in enforcement of immigration laws, techniques for separating terrorists from tourists and villains from visa holders are still rudimentary. In technology we trust: America's strength in research and innovation is crucial. The burgeoning field of biometrics -- voice, iris, and fingerprint recognition, for example -- is making passports, drivers licenses, and workplace-security identification much harder to counterfeit. But matching solutions to vulnerabilities is difficult. And an unwieldy process of government homeland security procurement could stifle innovation. One model is a small, 20-year-old interagency committee in Washington called the Technical Support Working Group that solicits ideas to solve specific problems, such as bomb detection and hostage rescue, and then funds specific development projects. The government needs many more such problem-solving, rapid-response efforts such as the TSWG, coordinated through Homeland Security.
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