Bruce Schneier: Toward a truly safer nation
Bruce Schneier
September 11, 2005 SCHNEIER0911
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5606306.html
Leaving aside the political posturing and the finger-pointing, how did our
nation mishandle Katrina so badly? After spending tens of billions of
dollars on homeland security (hundreds of billions, if you include the war
in Iraq) in the four years after 9/11, what did we do wrong? Why were there
so many failures at the local, state and federal levels?
These are reasonable questions. Katrina was a natural disaster and not a
terrorist attack, but that only matters before the event. Large-scale
terrorist attacks and natural disasters differ in cause, but they're very
similar in aftermath. And one can easily imagine a Katrina-like aftermath to
a terrorist attack, especially one involving nuclear, biological or chemical
weapons.
Improving our disaster response was discussed in the months after 9/11. We
were going to give money to local governments to fund first responders. We
established the Department of Homeland Security to streamline the chains of
command and facilitate efficient and effective response.
The problem is that we all got caught up in "movie-plot threats," specific
attack scenarios that capture the imagination and then the dollars. Whether
it's terrorists with box cutters or bombs in their shoes, we fear what we
can imagine. We're searching backpacks in the subways of New York, because
this year's movie plot is based on a terrorist bombing in the London
subways.
Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets
people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we're
going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if
the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.
Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things:
intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will help us
regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps both
against terrorist attacks and national disasters.
Katrina demonstrated that we haven't invested enough in emergency response.
New Orleans police officers couldn't talk with each other after power
outages shut down their primary communications system -- and there was no
backup. The Department of Homeland Security, which was established in order
to centralize federal response in a situation like this, couldn't figure out
who was in charge or what to do, and actively obstructed aid by others. FEMA
did no better, and thousands died while turf battles were being fought.
Our government's ineptitude in the aftermath of Katrina demonstrates how
little we're getting for all our security spending. It's unconscionable that
we're wasting our money fingerprinting foreigners, profiling airline
passengers, and invading foreign countries while emergency response at home
goes underfunded.
Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what the
next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.
This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up the
command chain, and resources -- people and supplies -- that can be quickly
deployed wherever they're needed.
Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer, regardless
of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that includes the NSA and
the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes the National Weather
Service and the National Earthquake Information Center.
Katrina deftly illustrated homeland security's biggest challenge: guessing
correctly. The solution is to fund security that doesn't rely on guessing.
Defending against movie plots doesn't make us appreciably safer. Emergency
response does. It lessens the damage and suffering caused by disasters,
whether man-made, like 9/11, or nature-made, like Katrina.
Bruce Schneier is the author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About
Security in an Uncertain World." He can be reached at www.schneier.com.
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